Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

while it grew, it seemed unreal there,

      Yet haunted Nihil’s chill stupendous realm,

      Unquenchable, perpetual, lonely, null,

      A pallid ghost of some dead eternity.

      It was as if she must pay now her debt,

      Her vain presumption to exist and think,

      To some brilliant Maya that conceived her soul.

      This most she must absolve with endless pangs,

      Her deep original sin, the will to be

      And the sin last, greatest, the spiritual pride,

      That, made of dust, equalled itself with heaven,

      Its scorn of the worm writhing in the mud,

      Condemned ephemeral, born from Nature’s dream,

      Refusal of the transient creature’s role,

      The claim to be a living fire of God,

      The will to be immortal and divine.

      In that tremendous darkness heavy and bare

      She atoned for all since the first act whence sprang

      The error of the consciousness of Time,

      The rending of the Inconscient’s seal of sleep,

      The primal and unpardoned revolt that broke

      The peace and silence of the Nothingness

      Which was before a seeming universe

      Appeared in a vanity of imagined Space

      And life arose engendering grief and pain:

      A great Negation was the Real’s face

      Prohibiting the vain process of Time:

      And when there is no world, no creature more,

      When Time’s intrusion has been blotted out,

      It shall last, unbodied, saved from thought, at peace.

      Accursed in what had been her godhead source,

      Condemned to live for ever empty of bliss,

      Her immortality her chastisement,

      Her spirit, guilty of being, wandered doomed,

      Moving for ever through eternal Night.

      But Maya is a veil of the Absolute;

      A Truth occult has made this mighty world:

      The Eternal’s wisdom and self-knowledge act

      In ignorant Mind and in the body’s steps.

      The Inconscient is the Superconscient’s sleep.

      An unintelligible Intelligence

      Invents creation’s paradox profound;

      Spiritual thought is crammed in Matter’s forms,

      Unseen it throws out a dumb energy

      And works a miracle by a machine.

      All here is a mystery of contraries:

      Darkness a magic of self-hidden Light,

      Suffering some secret rapture’s tragic mask

      And death an instrument of perpetual life.

      Although Death walks beside us on Life’s road,

      A dim bystander at the body’s start

      And a last judgment on man’s futile works,

      Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face:

      Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride

      The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,

      A grey defeat pregnant with victory,

      A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.

      The inconscient world is the spirit’s self-made room,

      Eternal Night shadow of eternal Day.

      Night is not our beginning nor our end;

      She is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid

      Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.

      We came to her from a supernal Light,

      By Light we live and to the Light we go.

      Here in this seat of Darkness mute and lone,

      In the heart of everlasting Nothingness

      Light conquered now even by that feeble beam:

      Its faint infiltration drilled the blind deaf mass;

      Almost it changed into a glimmering sight

      That housed the phantom of an aureate Sun

      Whose orb pupilled the eye of Nothingness.

      A golden fire came in and burned Night’s heart;

      Her dusky mindlessness began to dream;

      The Inconscient conscious grew, Night felt and thought.

      Assailed in the sovereign emptiness of its reign

      The intolerant Darkness paled and drew apart

      Till only a few black remnants stained that Ray.

      But on a failing edge of dumb lost space

      Still a great dragon body sullenly loomed;

      Adversary of the slow struggling Dawn

      Defending its ground of tortured mystery,

      It trailed its coils through the dead martyred air

      And curving fled down a grey slope of Time.

      There is a morning twilight of the gods;

      Miraculous from sleep their forms arise

      And God’s long nights are justified by dawn.

      There breaks a passion and splendour of new birth

      And hue-winged visions stray across the lids,

      Heaven’s chanting heralds waken dim-eyed Space.

      The dreaming deities look beyond the seen

      And fashion in their thoughts the ideal worlds

      Sprung from a limitless moment of desire

      That once had lodged in some abysmal heart.

      Passed was the heaviness of the eyeless dark

      And all the sorrow of the night was dead:

      Surprised by a blind joy with groping hands

      Like one who wakes to find his dreams were true,

      Into a happy misty twilit world

      Where all ran after light and joy and love

      She slipped; there far-off raptures drew more close

      And deep anticipations of delight,

      For ever eager to be grasped and held,

      Were never grasped, yet breathed strange ecstasy.

      A pearl-winged indistinctness fleeting swam,

      An air that dared not suffer too much light.

      Vague fields were there, vague pastures gleamed, vague trees,

      Vague scenes dim-hearted in a drifting haze;

      Vague cattle white roamed glimmering through the mist;

      Vague spirits wandered with a bodiless cry,

      Vague melodies touched the soul and fled pursued

      Into