Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      If heavens there are they are veiled in their own light,

      If a Truth eternal somewhere reigns unknown,

      It burns in a tremendous void of God;

      For truth shines far from the falsehoods of the world;

      How can the heavens come down to unhappy earth

      Or the eternal lodge in drifting time?

      How shall the Ideal tread earth’s dolorous soil

      Where life is only a labour and a hope,

      A child of Matter and by Matter fed,

      A fire flaming low in Nature’s grate,

      A wave that breaks upon a shore in Time,

      A journey’s toilsome trudge with death for goal?

      The Avatars have lived and died in vain,

      Vain was the sage’s thought, the prophet’s voice;

      In vain is seen the shining upward Way.

      Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun;

      She loves her fall and no omnipotence

      Her mortal imperfections can erase,

      Force on man’s crooked ignorance Heaven’s straight line

      Or colonise a world of death with gods.

      O traveller in the chariot of the Sun,

      High priestess in thy holy fancy’s shrine

      Who with a magic ritual in earth’s house

      Worshippest ideal and eternal love,

      What is this love thy thought has deified,

      This sacred legend and immortal myth?

      It is a conscious yearning of thy flesh,

      It is a glorious burning of thy nerves,

      A rose of dream-splendour petalling thy mind,

      A great red rapture and torture of thy heart.

      A sudden transfiguration of thy days,

      It passes and the world is as before.

      A ravishing edge of sweetness and of pain,

      A thrill in its yearning makes it seem divine,

      A golden bridge across the roar of the years,

      A cord tying thee to eternity.

      And yet how brief and frail! how soon is spent

      This treasure wasted by the gods on man,

      This happy closeness as of soul to soul,

      This honey of the body’s companionship,

      This heightened joy, this ecstasy in the veins,

      This strange illumination of the sense!

      If Satyavan had lived, love would have died;

      But Satyavan is dead and love shall live

      A little while in thy sad breast, until

      His face and body fade on memory’s wall

      Where other bodies, other faces come.

      When love breaks suddenly into the life

      At first man steps into a world of the sun;

      In his passion he feels his heavenly element:

      But only a fine sunlit patch of earth

      The marvellous aspect took of heaven’s outburst;

      The snake is there and the worm in the heart of the rose.

      A word, a moment’s act can slay the god;

      Precarious is his immortality,

      He has a thousand ways to suffer and die.

      Love cannot live by heavenly food alone,

      Only on sap of earth can it survive.

      For thy passion was a sensual want refined,

      A hunger of the body and the heart;

      Thy want can tire and cease or turn elsewhere.

      Or love may meet a dire and pitiless end

      By bitter treason, or wrath with cruel wounds

      Separate, or thy unsatisfied will to others

      Depart when first love’s joy lies stripped and slain:

      A dull indifference replaces fire

      Or an endearing habit imitates love:

      An outward and uneasy union lasts

      Or the routine of a life’s compromise:

      Where once the seed of oneness had been cast

      Into a semblance of spiritual ground

      By a divine adventure of heavenly powers

      Two strive, constant associates without joy,

      Two egos straining in a single leash,

      Two minds divided by their jarring thoughts,

      Two spirits disjoined, for ever separate.

      Thus is the ideal falsified in man’s world;

      Trivial or sombre, disillusion comes,

      Life’s harsh reality stares at the soul:

      Heaven’s hour adjourned flees into bodiless Time.

      Death saves thee from this and saves Satyavan:

      He now is safe, delivered from himself;

      He travels to silence and felicity.

      Call him not back to the treacheries of earth

      And the poor petty life of animal Man.

      In my vast tranquil spaces let him sleep

      In harmony with the mighty hush of death

      Where love lies slumbering on the breast of peace.

      And thou, go back alone to thy frail world:

      Chastise thy heart with knowledge, unhood to see,

      Thy nature raised into clear living heights,

      The heaven-bird’s view from unimagined peaks.

      For when thou givest thy spirit to a dream

      Soon hard necessity will smite thee awake:

      Purest delight began and it must end.

      Thou too shalt know, thy heart no anchor swinging,

      Thy cradled soul moored in eternal seas.

      Vain are the cycles of thy brilliant mind.

      Renounce, forgetting joy and hope and tears,

      Thy passionate nature in the bosom profound

      Of a happy Nothingness and worldless Calm,

      Delivered into my mysterious rest.

      One with my fathomless Nihil all forget.

      Forget thy fruitless spirit’s waste of force,

      Forget the weary circle of thy birth,

      Forget the joy and the struggle and the pain,

      The vague spiritual quest which first began

      When worlds broke forth like clusters of fire-flowers,

      And great burning thoughts voyaged through the sky of mind

      And Time and its aeons crawled across the vasts

      And