Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      The sombre Shadow sullen, implacable

      Made beauty and laughter more imperative;

      Enhanced by his grey, joy grew more bright and dear;

      His dark contrast edging ideal sight

      Deepened unuttered meanings to the heart;

      Pain grew a trembling undertone of bliss

      And transience immortality’s floating hem,

      A moment’s robe in which she looked more fair,

      Its antithesis sharpening her divinity.

      A comrade of the Ray and Mist and Flame,

      By a moon-bright face a brilliant moment drawn,

      Almost she seemed a thought mid floating thoughts,

      Seen hardly by a visionary mind

      Amid the white inward musings of the soul.

      Half-vanquished by the dream-happiness around,

      Awhile she moved on an enchantment’s soil,

      But still remained possessor of her soul.

      Above, her spirit in its mighty trance

      Saw all, but lived for its transcendent task,

      Immutable like a fixed eternal star.

      End of Canto One

      Canto Two

      The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal

      Then pealed the calm inexorable voice:

      Abolishing hope, cancelling life’s golden truths,

      Fatal its accents smote the trembling air.

      That lovely world swam thin and frail, most like

      Some pearly evanescent farewell gleam

      On the faint verge of dusk in moonless eves.

      “Prisoner of Nature, many-visioned spirit,

      Thought’s creature in the ideal’s realm enjoying

      Thy unsubstantial immortality

      The subtle marvellous mind of man has feigned,

      This is the world from which thy yearnings came.

      When it would build eternity from the dust,

      Man’s thought paints images illusion rounds;

      Prophesying glories it shall never see,

      It labours delicately among its dreams.

      Behold this fleeing of light-tasselled shapes,

      Aerial raiment of unbodied gods;

      A rapture of things that never can be born,

      Hope chants to hope a bright immortal choir;

      Cloud satisfies cloud, phantom to longing phantom

      Leans sweetly, sweetly is clasped or sweetly chased.

      This is the stuff from which the ideal is formed:

      Its builder is thought, its base the heart’s desire,

      But nothing real answers to their call.

      The ideal dwells not in heaven, nor on the earth,

      A bright delirium of man’s ardour of hope

      Drunk with the wine of its own fantasy.

      It is a brilliant shadow’s dreamy trail.

      Thy vision’s error builds the azure skies,

      Thy vision’s error drew the rainbow’s arch;

      Thy mortal longing made for thee a soul.

      This angel in thy body thou callst love,

      Who shapes his wings from thy emotion’s hues,

      In a ferment of thy body has been born

      And with the body that housed it it must die.

      It is a passion of thy yearning cells,

      It is flesh that calls to flesh to serve its lust;

      It is thy mind that seeks an answering mind

      And dreams awhile that it has found its mate;

      It is thy life that asks a human prop

      To uphold its weakness lonely in the world

      Or feeds its hunger on another’s life.

      A beast of prey that pauses in its prowl,

      It crouches under a bush in splendid flower

      To seize a heart and body for its food:

      This beast thou dreamst immortal and a god.

      O human mind, vainly thou torturest

      An hour’s delight to stretch through infinity’s

      Long void and fill its formless, passionless gulfs,

      Persuading the insensible Abyss

      To lend eternity to perishing things,

      And trickst the fragile movements of thy heart

      With thy spirit’s feint of immortality.

      All here emerges born from Nothingness;

      Encircled it lasts by the emptiness of Space,

      Awhile upheld by an unknowing Force,

      Then crumbles back into its parent Nought:

      Only the mute Alone can for ever be.

      In the Alone there is no room for love.

      In vain to clothe love’s perishable mud

      Thou hast woven on the Immortals’ borrowed loom

      The ideal’s gorgeous and unfading robe.

      The ideal never yet was real made.

      Imprisoned in form that glory cannot live;

      Into a body shut it breathes no more.

      Intangible, remote, for ever pure,

      A sovereign of its own brilliant void,

      Unwillingly it descends to earthly air

      To inhabit a white temple in man’s heart:

      In his heart it shines rejected by his life.

      Immutable, bodiless, beautiful, grand and dumb,

      Immobile on its shining throne it sits;

      Dumb it receives his offering and his prayer.

      It has no voice to answer to his call,

      No feet that move, no hands to take his gifts:

      Aerial statue of the nude Idea,

      Virgin conception of a bodiless god,

      Its light stirs man the thinker to create

      An earthly semblance of diviner things.

      Its hued reflection falls upon man’s acts;

      His institutions are its cenotaphs,

      He signs his dead conventions with its name;

      His virtues don the Ideal’s skiey robe

      And a nimbus of the outline of its face:

      He hides their littleness with the divine Name.

      Yet insufficient is the bright pretence

      To screen their indigent and earthy make:

      Earth only is