Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

a god.

      I am immortal in my mortality.

      I tremble not before the immobile gaze

      Of the unchanging marble hierarchies

      That look with the stone eyes of Law and Fate.

      My soul can meet them with its living fire.

      Out of thy shadow give me back again

      Into earth’s flowering spaces Satyavan

      In the sweet transiency of human limbs

      To do with him my spirit’s burning will.

      I will bear with him the ancient Mother’s load,

      I will follow with him earth’s path that leads to God.

      Else shall the eternal spaces open to me,

      While round us strange horizons far recede,

      Travelling together the immense unknown.

      For I who have trod with him the tracts of Time,

      Can meet behind his steps whatever night

      Or unimaginable stupendous dawn

      Breaks on our spirits in the untrod Beyond.

      Wherever thou leadst his soul I shall pursue.”

      But to her claim opposed, implacable,

      Insisting on the immutable Decree,

      Insisting on the immitigable Law

      And the insignificance of created things,

      Out of the rolling wastes of night there came

      Born from the enigma of the unknowable depths

      A voice of majesty and appalling scorn.

      As when the storm-haired Titan-striding sea

      Throws on a swimmer its tremendous laugh

      Remembering all the joy its waves have drowned,

      So from the darkness of the sovereign night

      Against the Woman’s boundless heart arose

      The almighty cry of universal Death.

      “Hast thou god-wings or feet that tread my stars,

      Frail creature with the courage that aspires,

      Forgetting thy bounds of thought, thy mortal role?

      Their orbs were coiled before thy soul was formed.

      I, Death, created them out of my void;

      All things I have built in them and I destroy.

      I made the worlds my net, each joy a mesh.

      A Hunger amorous of its suffering prey,

      Life that devours, my image see in things.

      Mortal, whose spirit is my wandering breath,

      Whose transience was imagined by my smile,

      Flee clutching thy poor gains to thy trembling breast

      Pierced by my pangs Time shall not soon appease.

      Blind slave of my deaf force whom I compel

      To sin that I may punish, to desire

      That I may scourge thee with despair and grief

      And thou come bleeding to me at the last,

      Thy nothingness recognised, my greatness known,

      Turn nor attempt forbidden happy fields

      Meant for the souls that can obey my law,

      Lest in their sombre shrines thy tread awake

      From their uneasy iron-hearted sleep

      The Furies who avenge fulfilled desire.

      Dread lest in skies where passion hoped to live,

      The Unknown’s lightnings start and, terrified,

      Lone, sobbing, hunted by the hounds of heaven,

      A wounded and forsaken soul thou flee

      Through the long torture of the centuries,

      Nor many lives exhaust the tireless Wrath

      Hell cannot slake nor Heaven’s mercy assuage.

      I will take from thee the black eternal grip:

      Clasping in thy heart thy fate’s exiguous dole

      Depart in peace, if peace for man is just.”

      But Savitri answered meeting scorn with scorn,

      The mortal woman to the dreadful Lord:

      “Who is this God imagined by thy night,

      Contemptuously creating worlds disdained,

      Who made for vanity the brilliant stars?

      Not he who has reared his temple in my thoughts

      And made his sacred floor my human heart.

      My God is will and triumphs in his paths,

      My God is love and sweetly suffers all.

      To him I have offered hope for sacrifice

      And gave my longings as a sacrament.

      Who shall prohibit or hedge in his course,

      The wonderful, the charioteer, the swift?

      A traveller of the million roads of life,

      His steps familiar with the lights of heaven

      Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;

      There he descends to edge eternal joy.

      Love’s golden wings have power to fan thy void:

      The eyes of love gaze starlike through death’s night,

      The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds.

      He labours in the depths, exults on the heights;

      He shall remake thy universe, O Death.”

      She spoke and for a while no voice replied,

      While still they travelled through the trackless night

      And still that gleam was like a pallid eye

      Troubling the darkness with its doubtful gaze.

      Then once more came a deep and perilous pause

      In that unreal journey through blind Nought;

      Once more a Thought, a Word in the void arose

      And Death made answer to the human soul:

      “What is thy hope? to what dost thou aspire?

      This is thy body’s sweetest lure of bliss,

      Assailed by pain, a frail precarious form,

      To please for a few years thy faltering sense

      With honey of physical longings and the heart’s fire

      And, a vain oneness seeking, to embrace

      The brilliant idol of a fugitive hour.

      And thou, what art thou, soul, thou glorious dream

      Of brief emotions made and glittering thoughts,

      A thin dance of fireflies speeding through the night,

      A sparkling ferment in life’s sunlit mire?

      Wilt thou claim immortality, O heart,

      Crying against the eternal witnesses

      That thou and he are endless powers and last?

      Death