Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      He built life new, measured the universe,

      Opposed his fate and wrestled with unseen Powers,

      Conquered and used the laws that rule the world,

      And hoped to ride the heavens and reach the stars,

      A master of his huge environment.

      Now through Mind’s windows stares the demigod

      Hidden behind the curtains of man’s soul:

      He has seen the Unknown, looked on Truth’s veilless face;

      A ray has touched him from the eternal sun;

      Motionless, voiceless in foreseeing depths,

      He stands awake in Supernature’s light

      And sees a glory of arisen wings

      And sees the vast descending might of God.

      “O Death, thou lookst on an unfinished world

      Assailed by thee and of its road unsure,

      Peopled by imperfect minds and ignorant lives,

      And sayest God is not and all is vain.

      How shall the child already be the man?

      Because he is infant, shall he never grow?

      Because he is ignorant, shall he never learn?

      In a small fragile seed a great tree lurks,

      In a tiny gene a thinking being is shut;

      A little element in a little sperm,

      It grows and is a conqueror and a sage.

      Then wilt thou spew out, Death, God’s mystic truth,

      Deny the occult spiritual miracle?

      Still wilt thou say there is no spirit, no God?

      A mute material Nature wakes and sees;

      She has invented speech, unveiled a will.

      Something there waits beyond towards which she strives,

      Something surrounds her into which she grows:

      To uncover the spirit, to change back into God,

      To exceed herself is her transcendent task.

      In God concealed the world began to be,

      Tardily it travels towards manifest God:

      Our imperfection towards perfection toils,

      The body is the chrysalis of a soul:

      The infinite holds the finite in its arms,

      Time travels towards revealed eternity.

      A miracle structure of the eternal Mage,

      Matter its mystery hides from its own eyes,

      A scripture written out in cryptic signs,

      An occult document of the All-Wonderful’s art.

      All here bears witness to his secret might,

      In all we feel his presence and his power.

      A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun,

      A glory is the gold and glimmering moon,

      A glory is his dream of purple sky.

      A march of his greatness are the wheeling stars.

      His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees,

      His moments of beauty triumph in a flower;

      The blue sea’s chant, the rivulet’s wandering voice

      Are murmurs falling from the Eternal’s harp.

      This world is God fulfilled in outwardness.

      His ways challenge our reason and our sense;

      By blind brute movements of an ignorant Force,

      By means we slight as small, obscure or base,

      A greatness founded upon little things,

      He has built a world in the unknowing Void.

      His forms he has massed from infinitesimal dust;

      His marvels are built from insignificant things.

      If mind is crippled, life untaught and crude,

      If brutal masks are there and evil acts,

      They are incidents of his vast and varied plot,

      His great and dangerous drama’s needed steps;

      He makes with these and all his passion-play,

      A play and yet no play but the deep scheme

      Of a transcendent Wisdom finding ways

      To meet her Lord in the shadow and the Night:

      Above her is the vigil of the stars;

      Watched by a solitary Infinitude

      She embodies in dumb Matter the Divine,

      In symbol minds and lives the Absolute.

      A miracle-monger her mechanical craft;

      Matter’s machine worked out the laws of thought,

      Life’s engines served the labour of a soul:

      The Mighty Mother her creation wrought,

      A huge caprice self-bound by iron laws,

      And shut God into an enigmatic world:

      She lulled the Omniscient into nescient sleep,

      Omnipotence on Inertia’s back she drove,

      Trod perfectly with divine unconscious steps

      The enormous circle of her wonder-works.

      Immortality assured itself by death;

      The Eternal’s face was seen through drifts of Time.

      His knowledge he disguised as Ignorance,

      His Good he sowed in Evil’s monstrous bed,

      Made error a door by which Truth could enter in,

      His plant of bliss watered with Sorrow’s tears.

      A thousand aspects point back to the One;

      A dual Nature covered the Unique.

      In this meeting of the Eternal’s mingling masques,

      This tangle-dance of passionate contraries

      Locking like lovers in a forbidden embrace

      The quarrel of their lost identity,

      Through this wrestle and wrangle of the extremes of Power

      Earth’s million roads struggled towards deity.

      All stumbled on behind a stumbling Guide,

      Yet every stumble is a needed pace

      On unknown routes to an unknowable goal.

      All blundered and straggled towards the One Divine.

      As if transmuted by a titan spell

      The eternal Powers assumed a dubious face:

      Idols of an oblique divinity,

      They wore the heads of animal or troll,

      Assumed ears of the faun, the satyr’s hoof,

      Or harboured the demoniac in their gaze:

      A crooked maze they made of thinking mind,

      They suffered a metamorphosis of the heart,

      Admitting bacchant revellers from the Night