Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

vision turned to read the enigmaed world,

      Her will tempered in the blaze of Wisdom’s sun

      And the flaming silence of her heart of love?

      The world is a spiritual paradox

      Invented by a need in the Unseen,

      A poor translation to the creature’s sense

      Of That which for ever exceeds idea and speech,

      A symbol of what can never be symbolised,

      A language mispronounced, misspelt, yet true.

      Its powers have come from the eternal heights

      And plunged into the inconscient dim Abyss

      And risen from it to do their marvellous work.

      The soul is a figure of the Unmanifest,

      The mind labours to think the Unthinkable,

      The life to call the Immortal into birth,

      The body to enshrine the Illimitable.

      The world is not cut off from Truth and God.

      In vain thou hast dug the dark unbridgeable gulf,

      In vain thou hast built the blind and doorless wall:

      Man’s soul crosses through thee to Paradise,

      Heaven’s sun forces its way through death and night;

      Its light is seen upon our being’s verge.

      My mind is a torch lit from the eternal sun,

      My life a breath drawn by the immortal Guest,

      My mortal body is the Eternal’s house.

      Already the torch becomes the undying ray,

      Already the life is the Immortal’s force,

      The house grows of the householder part and one.

      How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind

      And Bliss can never invade the mortal’s heart

      Or God descend into the world he made?

      If in the meaningless Void creation rose,

      If from a bodiless Force Matter was born,

      If Life could climb in the unconscious tree,

      Its green delight break into emerald leaves

      And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower,

      If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell

      And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain,

      And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh,

      How shall the nameless Light not leap on men,

      And unknown powers emerge from Nature’s sleep?

      Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars

      Arise in the mind-mooned splendour of Ignorance;

      Even now the deathless Lover’s touch we feel:

      If the chamber’s door is even a little ajar,

      What then can hinder God from stealing in

      Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul?

      Already God is near, the Truth is close:

      Because the dark atheist body knows him not,

      Must the sage deny the Light, the seer his soul?

      I am not bound by thought or sense or shape;

      I live in the glory of the Infinite,

      I am near to the Nameless and Unknowable,

      The Ineffable is now my household mate.

      But standing on Eternity’s luminous brink

      I have discovered that the world was He;

      I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self,

      But I have loved too the body of my God.

      I have pursued him in his earthly form.

      A lonely freedom cannot satisfy

      A heart that has grown one with every heart:

      I am a deputy of the aspiring world,

      My spirit’s liberty I ask for all.”

      Then rang again a deeper cry of Death.

      As if beneath its weight of sterile law

      Oppressed by its own obstinate meaningless will,

      Disdainful, weary and compassionate,

      It kept no more its old intolerant sound,

      But seemed like life’s in her unnumbered paths

      Toiling for ever and achieving nought

      Because of birth and change, her mortal powers

      By which she lasts, around the term-posts fixed

      Turning of a wide circling aimless race

      Whose course for ever speeds and is the same.

      In its long play with Fate and Chance and Time

      Assured of the game’s vanity lost or won,

      Crushed by its load of ignorance and doubt

      Which knowledge seems to increase and growth to enlarge,

      The earth-mind sinks and it despairs and looks

      Old, weary and discouraged on its work.

      Yet was all nothing then or vainly achieved?

      Some great thing has been done, some light, some power

      Delivered from the huge Inconscient’s grasp:

      It has emerged from night; it sees its dawns

      Circling for ever though no dawn can stay.

      This change was in the godhead’s far-flung voice;

      His form of dread was altered and admitted

      Our transient effort at eternity,

      Yet flung vast doubts of what might else have been

      On grandiose hints of an impossible day.

      The great voice surging cried to Savitri:

      “Because thou knowst the wisdom that transcends

      Both veil of forms and the contempt of forms,

      Arise delivered by the seeing gods.

      If free thou hadst kept thy mind from life’s fierce stress,

      Thou mightst have been like them omniscient, calm.

      But the violent and passionate heart forbids.

      It is the storm bird of an anarch Power

      That would upheave the world and tear from it

      The indecipherable scroll of Fate,

      Death’s rule and Law and the unknowable Will.

      Hasteners to action, violators of God

      Are these great spirits who have too much love,

      And they who formed like thee, for both art thou,

      Have come into the narrow bounds of life

      With too large natures overleaping time.

      Worshippers of force who know not her recoil,

      Their giant wills compel the troubled years.

      The wise are tranquil; silent the great hills

      Rise