Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

imitates with verve a faery dance.

      An extract pressed from hard experience,

      Man’s knowledge casked in the barrels of Memory

      Has the harsh savour of a mortal draught:

      A sweet secretion from the erotic glands

      Flattering and torturing the burning nerves,

      Love is a honey and poison in the breast

      Drunk by it as the nectar of the gods.

      Earth’s human wisdom is no great-browed power,

      And love no gleaming angel from the skies;

      If they aspire beyond earth’s dullard air,

      Arriving sunwards with frail waxen wings,

      How high could reach that forced unnatural flight?

      But not on earth can divine wisdom reign

      And not on earth can divine love be found;

      Heaven-born, only in heaven can they live;

      Or else there too perhaps they are shining dreams.

      Nay, is not all thou art and doest a dream?

      Thy mind and life are tricks of Matter’s force.

      If thy mind seems to thee a radiant sun,

      If thy life runs a swift and glorious stream,

      This is the illusion of thy mortal heart

      Dazzled by a ray of happiness or light.

      Impotent to live by their own right divine,

      Convinced of their brilliant unreality,

      When their supporting ground is cut away,

      These children of Matter into Matter die.

      Even Matter vanishes into Energy’s vague

      And Energy is a motion of old Nought.

      How shall the Ideal’s unsubstantial hues

      Be painted stiff on earth’s vermilion blur,

      A dream within a dream come doubly true?

      How shall the will-o’-the-wisp become a star?

      The Ideal is a malady of thy mind,

      A bright delirium of thy speech and thought,

      A strange wine of beauty lifting thee to false sight.

      A noble fiction of thy yearnings made,

      Thy human imperfection it must share:

      Its forms in Nature disappoint the heart,

      And never shall it find its heavenly shape

      And never can it be fulfilled in Time.

      O soul misled by the splendour of thy thoughts,

      O earthly creature with thy dream of heaven,

      Obey, resigned and still, the earthly law.

      Accept the brief light that falls upon thy days;

      Take what thou canst of Life’s permitted joy;

      Submitting to the ordeal of fate’s scourge

      Suffer what thou must of toil and grief and care.

      There shall approach silencing thy passionate heart

      My long calm night of everlasting sleep:

      There into the hush from which thou cam’st retire.”

      End of Canto Two

      Canto Three

      The Debate of Love and Death

      A sad destroying cadence the voice sank;

      It seemed to lead the advancing march of Life

      Into some still original Inane.

      But Savitri answered to almighty Death:

      “O dark-browed sophist of the universe

      Who veilst the Real with its own Idea,

      Hiding with brute objects Nature’s living face,

      Masking eternity with thy dance of death,

      Thou hast woven the ignorant mind into a screen

      And made of Thought error’s purveyor and scribe,

      And a false witness of mind’s servant sense.

      An aesthete of the sorrow of the world,

      Champion of a harsh and sad philosophy

      Thou hast used words to shutter out the Light

      And called in Truth to vindicate a lie.

      A lying reality is falsehood’s crown

      And a perverted truth her richest gem.

      O Death, thou speakest truth but truth that slays,

      I answer to thee with the Truth that saves.

      A traveller new-discovering himself,

      One made of Matter’s world his starting-point,

      He made of Nothingness his living-room

      And Night a process of the eternal light

      And death a spur towards immortality.

      God wrapped his head from sight in Matter’s cowl,

      His consciousness dived into inconscient depths,

      All-Knowledge seemed a huge dark Nescience;

      Infinity wore a boundless zero’s form.

      His abysms of bliss became insensible deeps,

      Eternity a blank spiritual Vast.

      Annulling an original nullity

      The Timeless took its ground in emptiness

      And drew the figure of a universe,

      That the spirit might adventure into Time

      And wrestle with adamant Necessity

      And the soul pursue a cosmic pilgrimage.

      A spirit moved in black immensities

      And built a Thought in ancient Nothingness;

      A soul was lit in God’s tremendous Void,

      A secret labouring glow of nascent fire.

      In Nihil’s gulf his mighty Puissance wrought;

      She swung her formless motion into shapes,

      Made Matter the body of the Bodiless.

      Infant and dim the eternal Mights awoke.

      In inert Matter breathed a slumbering Life,

      In a subconscient Life Mind lay asleep;

      In waking Life it stretched its giant limbs

      To shake from it the torpor of its drowse;

      A senseless substance quivered into sense,

      The world’s heart commenced to beat, its eyes to see,

      In the crowded dumb vibrations of a brain

      Thought fumbled in a ring to find itself,

      Discovered speech and fed the new-born Word

      That bridged with spans of light the world’s ignorance.

      In waking Mind, the Thinker built his house.

      A reasoning animal willed and planned and sought;

      He stood