Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

harmonious distances unseized;

      Forms subtly elusive and half-luminous powers

      Wishing no goal for their unearthly course

      Strayed happily through vague ideal lands,

      Or floated without footing or their walk

      Left steps of reverie on sweet memory’s ground;

      Or they paced to the mighty measure of their thoughts

      Led by a low far chanting of the gods.

      A ripple of gleaming wings crossed the far sky;

      Birds like pale-bosomed imaginations flew

      With low disturbing voices of desire,

      And half-heard lowings drew the listening ear,

      As if the Sun-god’s brilliant kine were there

      Hidden in mist and passing towards the sun.

      These fugitive beings, these elusive shapes

      Were all that claimed the eye and met the soul,

      The natural inhabitants of that world.

      But nothing there was fixed or stayed for long;

      No mortal feet could rest upon that soil,

      No breath of life lingered embodied there.

      In that fine chaos joy fled dancing past

      And beauty evaded settled line and form

      And hid its sense in mysteries of hue;

      Yet gladness ever repeated the same notes

      And gave the sense of an enduring world;

      There was a strange consistency of shapes,

      And the same thoughts were constant passers-by

      And all renewed unendingly its charm

      Alluring ever the expectant heart

      Like music that one always waits to hear,

      Like the recurrence of a haunting rhyme.

      One touched incessantly things never seized,

      A skirt of worlds invisibly divine.

      As if a trail of disappearing stars

      There showered upon the floating atmosphere

      Colours and lights and evanescent gleams

      That called to follow into a magic heaven,

      And in each cry that fainted on the ear

      There was the voice of an unrealised bliss.

      An adoration reigned in the yearning heart,

      A spirit of purity, an elusive presence

      Of faery beauty and ungrasped delight

      Whose momentary and escaping thrill,

      However unsubstantial to our flesh,

      And brief even in imperishableness,

      Much sweeter seemed than any rapture known

      Earth or all-conquering heaven can ever give.

      Heaven ever young and earth too firm and old

      Delay the heart by immobility:

      Their raptures of creation last too long,

      Their bold formations are too absolute;

      Carved by an anguish of divine endeavour

      They stand up sculptured on the eternal hills,

      Or quarried from the living rocks of God

      Win immortality by perfect form.

      They are too intimate with eternal things:

      Vessels of infinite significances,

      They are too clear, too great, too meaningful;

      No mist or shadow soothes the vanquished sight,

      No soft penumbra of incertitude.

      These only touched a golden hem of bliss,

      The gleaming shoulder of some godlike hope,

      The flying feet of exquisite desires.

      On a slow trembling brink between night and day

      They shone like visitants from the morning star,

      Satisfied beginnings of perfection, first

      Tremulous imaginings of a heavenly world:

      They mingle in a passion of pursuit,

      Thrilled with a spray of joy too slight to tire.

      All in this world was shadowed forth, not limned,

      Like faces leaping on a fan of fire

      Or shapes of wonder in a tinted blur,

      Like fugitive landscapes painting silver mists.

      Here vision fled back from the sight alarmed,

      And sound sought refuge from the ear’s surprise,

      And all experience was a hasty joy.

      The joys here snatched were half-forbidden things,

      Timorous soul-bridals delicately veiled

      As when a goddess’ bosom dimly moves

      To first desire and her white soul transfigured,

      A glimmering Eden crossed by faery gleams,

      Trembles to expectation’s fiery wand,

      But nothing is familiar yet with bliss.

      All things in this fair realm were heavenly strange

      In a fleeting gladness of untired delight,

      In an insistency of magic change.

      Past vanishing hedges, hurrying hints of fields,

      Mid swift escaping lanes that fled her feet

      Journeying she wished no end: as one through clouds

      Travels upon a mountain ridge and hears

      Arising to him out of hidden depths

      Sound of invisible streams, she walked besieged

      By the illusion of a mystic space,

      A charm of bodiless touches felt and heard

      A sweetness as of voices high and dim

      Calling like travellers upon seeking winds

      Melodiously with an alluring cry.

      As if a music old yet ever new,

      Moving suggestions on her heart-strings dwelt,

      Thoughts that no habitation found, yet clung

      With passionate repetition to her mind,

      Desires that hurt not, happy only to live

      Always the same and always unfulfilled

      Sang in the breast like a celestial lyre.

      Thus all could last yet nothing ever be.

      In this beauty as of mind made visible,

      Dressed in its rays of wonder Satyavan

      Before her seemed the centre of its charm,

      Head of her loveliness of longing dreams

      And captain of the fancies of her soul.

      Even the dreadful majesty of Death’s face

      And its sombre sadness could not darken nor slay

      The