Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

shapes

      Enveloped in the grey mantle of a dream.

      Imagining meanings in life’s heavy drift,

      They trusted in the uncertain environment

      And waited for death to change their spirit’s scene.

      A savage din of labour and a tramp

      Of armoured life and the monotonous hum

      Of thoughts and acts that ever were the same,

      As if the dull reiterated drone

      Of a great brute machine, beset her soul, –

      A grey dissatisfied rumour like a ghost

      Of the moaning of a loud unquiet sea.

      A huge inhuman cyclopean voice,

      A Babel-builders’ song towering to heaven,

      A throb of engines and the clang of tools

      Brought the deep undertone of labour’s pain.

      As when pale lightnings tear a tortured sky,

      High overhead a cloud-rimmed series flared

      Chasing like smoke from a red funnel driven,

      The forced creations of an ignorant Mind:

      Drifting she saw like pictured fragments flee

      Phantoms of human thought and baffled hopes,

      The shapes of Nature and the arts of man,

      Philosophies and disciplines and laws,

      And the dead spirit of old societies,

      Constructions of the Titan and the worm.

      As if lost remnants of forgotten light,

      Before her mind there fled with trailing wings

      Dimmed revelations and delivering words,

      Emptied of their mission and their strength to save,

      The messages of the evangelist gods,

      Voices of prophets, scripts of vanishing creeds.

      Each in its hour eternal claimed went by:

      Ideals, systems, sciences, poems, crafts

      Tireless there perished and again recurred,

      Sought restlessly by some creative Power;

      But all were dreams crossing an empty vast.

      Ascetic voices called of lonely seers

      On mountain summits or by river banks

      Or from the desolate heart of forest glades

      Seeking heaven’s rest or the spirit’s worldless peace,

      Or in bodies motionless like statues, fixed

      In tranced cessations of their sleepless thought

      Sat sleeping souls, and this too was a dream.

      All things the past has made and slain were there,

      Its lost forgotten forms that once had lived,

      And all the present loves as new-revealed

      And all the hopes the future brings had failed

      Already, caught and spent in efforts vain,

      Repeated fruitlessly age after age.

      Unwearied all returned insisting still

      Because of joy in the anguish of pursuit

      And joy to labour and to win and lose

      And joy to create and keep and joy to kill.

      The rolling cycles passed and came again,

      Brought the same toils and the same barren end,

      Forms ever new and ever old, the long

      Appalling revolutions of the world.

      Once more arose the great destroying Voice:

      Across the fruitless labour of the worlds

      His huge denial’s all-defeating might

      Pursued the ignorant march of dolorous Time.

      “Behold the figures of this symbol realm,

      Its solid outlines of creative dream

      Inspiring the great concrete tasks of earth.

      In its motion-parable of human life

      Here thou canst trace the outcome Nature gives

      To the sin of being and the error in things

      And the desire that compels to live

      And man’s incurable malady of hope.

      In an immutable order’s hierarchy

      Where Nature changes not, man cannot change:

      Ever he obeys her fixed mutation’s law;

      In a new version of her oft-told tale

      In ever-wheeling cycles turns the race.

      His mind is pent in circling boundaries:

      For mind is man, beyond thought he cannot soar.

      If he could leave his limits he would be safe:

      He sees but cannot mount to his greater heavens;

      Even winged, he sinks back to his native soil.

      He is a captive in his net of mind

      And beats soul-wings against the walls of life.

      In vain his heart lifts up its yearning prayer,

      Peopling with brilliant Gods the formless Void;

      Then disappointed to the Void he turns

      And in its happy nothingness asks release,

      The calm Nirvana of his dream of self:

      The Word in silence ends, in Nought the name.

      Apart amid the mortal multitudes,

      He calls the Godhead incommunicable

      To be the lover of his lonely soul

      Or casts his spirit into its void embrace.

      Or he finds his copy in the impartial All;

      He imparts to the Immobile his own will,

      Attributes to the Eternal wrath and love

      And to the Ineffable lends a thousand names.

      Hope not to call God down into his life.

      How shalt thou bring the Everlasting here?

      There is no house for him in hurrying Time.

      Vainly thou seekst in Matter’s world an aim;

      No aim is there, only a will to be.

      All walk by Nature bound for ever the same.

      Look on these forms that stay awhile and pass,

      These lives that long and strive, then are no more,

      These structures that have no abiding truth,

      The saviour creeds that cannot save themselves,

      But perish in the strangling hands of the years,

      Discarded from man’s thought, proved false by Time,

      Philosophies that strip all problems bare

      But nothing ever have solved since earth began,

      And sciences omnipotent in vain

      By which men learn of what the suns are