Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

makes her creatures’ eyes to weep;

      Testing with sorrow’s edge her children’s breasts,

      She spends on life’s vain waste of hope and toil

      The poignant luxury of grief and tears.

      In the nightmare change of her half-conscious dream,

      Tortured herself and torturing by her touch,

      She comes to our hearts and bodies and our lives

      Wearing a hard and cruel mask of pain.

      Our nature twisted by the abortive birth

      Returns wry answers to life’s questioning shocks,

      An acrid relish finds in the world’s pangs,

      Drinks the sharp wine of grief’s perversity.

      A curse is laid on the pure joy of life:

      Delight, God’s sweetest sign and Beauty’s twin,

      Dreaded by aspiring saint and austere sage,

      Is shunned, a dangerous and ambiguous cheat,

      A specious trick of an infernal Power

      It tempts the soul to its self-hurt and fall.

      A puritan God made pleasure a poisonous fruit,

      Or red drug in the market-place of Death,

      And sin the child of Nature’s ecstasy.

      Yet every creature hunts for happiness,

      Buys with harsh pangs or tears by violence

      From the dull breast of the inanimate globe

      Some fragment or some broken shard of bliss.

      Even joy itself becomes a poisonous draught;

      Its hunger is made a dreadful hook of Fate.

      All means are held good to catch a single beam,

      Eternity sacrificed for a moment’s bliss:

      Yet for joy and not for sorrow earth was made

      And not as a dream in endless suffering Time.

      Although God made the world for his delight,

      An ignorant Power took charge and seemed his Will

      And Death’s deep falsity has mastered Life.

      All grew a play of Chance simulating Fate.

      “A secret air of pure felicity

      Deep like a sapphire heaven our spirits breathe;

      Our hearts and bodies feel its obscure call,

      Our senses grope for it and touch and lose.

      If this withdrew, the world would sink in the Void;

      If this were not, nothing could move or live.

      A hidden Bliss is at the root of things.

      A mute Delight regards Time’s countless works:

      To house God’s joy in things Space gave wide room,

      To house God’s joy in self our souls were born.

      This universe an old enchantment guards;

      Its objects are carved cups of World-Delight

      Whose charmed wine is some deep soul’s rapture-drink:

      The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams,

      He has made blank ancient Space his marvel-house;

      He spilled his spirit into Matter’s signs:

      His fires of grandeur burn in the great sun,

      He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon;

      He is beauty carolling in the fields of sound;

      He chants the stanzas of the odes of Wind;

      He is silence watching in the stars at night;

      He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough,

      Lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and tree.

      Even in this labour and dolour of Ignorance,

      On the hard perilous ground of difficult earth,

      In spite of death and evil circumstance

      A will to live persists, a joy to be.

      There is a joy in all that meets the sense,

      A joy in all experience of the soul,

      A joy in evil and a joy in good,

      A joy in virtue and a joy in sin:

      Indifferent to the threat of Karmic law,

      Joy dares to grow upon forbidden soil,

      Its sap runs through the plant and flowers of Pain:

      It thrills with the drama of fate and tragic doom,

      It tears its food from sorrow and ecstasy,

      On danger and difficulty whets its strength;

      It wallows with the reptile and the worm

      And lifts its head, an equal of the stars;

      It shares the faeries’ dance, dines with the gnome:

      It basks in the light and heat of many suns,

      The sun of Beauty and the sun of Power

      Flatter and foster it with golden beams;

      It grows towards the Titan and the God.

      On earth it lingers drinking its deep fill,

      Through the symbol of her pleasure and her pain,

      Of the grapes of Heaven and the flowers of the Abyss,

      Of the flame-stabs and the torment-craft of Hell

      And dim fragments of the glory of Paradise.

      In the small paltry pleasures of man’s life,

      In his petty passions and joys it finds a taste,

      A taste in tears and torture of broken hearts,

      In the crown of gold and in the crown of thorns,

      In life’s nectar of sweetness and its bitter wine.

      All being it explores for unknown bliss,

      Sounds all experience for things new and strange.

      Life brings into the earthly creature’s days

      A tongue of glory from a brighter sphere:

      It deepens in his musings and his Art,

      It leaps at the splendour of some perfect word,

      It exults in his high resolves and noble deeds,

      Wanders in his errors, dares the abyss’s brink,

      It climbs in his climbings, wallows in his fall.

      Angel and demon brides his chamber share,

      Possessors or competitors for life’s heart.

      To the enjoyer of the cosmic scene

      His greatness and his littleness equal are,

      His magnanimity and meanness hues

      Cast on some neutral background of the gods:

      The Artist’s skill he admires who planned it all.

      But not for ever endures this danger game:

      Beyond the earth, but meant for delivered earth,

      Wisdom and joy prepare their perfect crown;

      Truth