Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      At last the soul turns to eternal things,

      In every shrine it cries for the clasp of God.

      Then is there played the crowning Mystery,

      Then is achieved the longed-for miracle.

      Immortal Bliss her wide celestial eyes

      Opens on the stars, she stirs her mighty limbs;

      Time thrills to the sapphics of her amour-song

      And Space fills with a white beatitude.

      Then leaving to its grief the human heart,

      Abandoning speech and the name-determined realms,

      Through a gleaming far-seen sky of wordless thought,

      Through naked thought-free heavens of absolute sight,

      She climbs to the summits where the unborn Idea

      Remembering the future that must be

      Looks down upon the works of labouring Force,

      Immutable above the world it made.

      In the vast golden laughter of Truth’s sun

      Like a great heaven-bird on a motionless sea

      Is poised her winged ardour of creative joy

      On the still deep of the Eternal’s peace.

      This was the aim, this the supernal Law,

      Nature’s allotted task when beauty-drenched

      In dim mist-waters of inconscient sleep,

      Out of the Void this grand creation rose, –

      For this the Spirit came into the Abyss

      And charged with its power Matter’s unknowing force,

      In Night’s bare session to cathedral Light,

      In Death’s realm repatriate immortality.

      A mystic slow transfiguration works.

      All our earth starts from mud and ends in sky,

      And Love that was once an animal’s desire,

      Then a sweet madness in the rapturous heart,

      An ardent comradeship in the happy mind,

      Becomes a wide spiritual yearning’s space.

      A lonely soul passions for the Alone,

      The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God,

      A body is his chamber and his shrine.

      Then is our being rescued from separateness;

      All is itself, all is new-felt in God:

      A Lover leaning from his cloister’s door

      Gathers the whole world into his single breast.

      Then shall the business fail of Night and Death:

      When unity is won, when strife is lost

      And all is known and all is clasped by Love

      Who would turn back to ignorance and pain?

      “O Death, I have triumphed over thee within;

      I quiver no more with the assault of grief;

      A mighty calmness seated deep within

      Has occupied my body and my sense:

      It takes the world’s grief and transmutes to strength,

      It makes the world’s joy one with the joy of God.

      My love eternal sits throned on God’s calm;

      For Love must soar beyond the very heavens

      And find its secret sense ineffable;

      It must change its human ways to ways divine,

      Yet keep its sovereignty of earthly bliss.

      O Death, not for my heart’s sweet poignancy

      Nor for my happy body’s bliss alone

      I have claimed from thee the living Satyavan,

      But for his work and mine, our sacred charge.

      Our lives are God’s messengers beneath the stars;

      To dwell under death’s shadow they have come

      Tempting God’s light to earth for the ignorant race,

      His love to fill the hollow in men’s hearts,

      His bliss to heal the unhappiness of the world.

      For I, the woman, am the force of God,

      He the Eternal’s delegate soul in man.

      My will is greater than thy law, O Death;

      My love is stronger than the bonds of Fate:

      Our love is the heavenly seal of the Supreme.

      I guard that seal against thy rending hands.

      Love must not cease to live upon the earth;

      For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,

      Love is the far Transcendent’s angel here;

      Love is man’s lien on the Absolute.”

      But to the woman Death the god replied,

      With the ironic laughter of his voice

      Discouraging the labour of the stars:

      “Even so men cheat the Truth with splendid thoughts.

      Thus wilt thou hire the glorious charlatan, Mind,

      To weave from his Ideal’s gossamer air

      A fine raiment for thy body’s nude desires

      And thy heart’s clutching greedy passion clothe?

      Daub not the web of life with magic hues:

      Make rather thy thought a plain and faithful glass

      Reflecting Matter and mortality,

      And know thy soul a product of the flesh,

      A made-up self in a constructed world.

      Thy words are large murmurs in a mystic dream.

      For how in the soiled heart of man could dwell

      The immaculate grandeur of thy dream-built God,

      Or who can see a face and form divine

      In the naked two-legged worm thou callest man?

      O human face, put off mind-painted masks:

      The animal be, the worm that Nature meant;

      Accept thy futile birth, thy narrow life.

      For truth is bare like stone and hard like death;

      Bare in the bareness, hard with truth’s hardness live.”

      But Savitri replied to the dire God:

      “Yes, I am human. Yet shall man by me,

      Since in humanity waits his hour the God,

      Trample thee down to reach the immortal heights,

      Transcending grief and pain and fate and death.

      Yes, my humanity is a mask of God:

      He dwells in me, the mover of my acts,

      Turning the great wheel of his cosmic work.

      I am the living body of his light,

      I am the thinking instrument of his power,

      I incarnate Wisdom in an earthly breast,