Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

towards their unreached sky,

      Seated on their unchanging base, their heads

      Dreamless in heaven’s immutable domain.

      On their aspiring tops, sublime and still,

      Lifting half-way to heaven the climbing soul

      The mighty mediators stand content

      To watch the revolutions of the stars:

      Motionlessly moving with the might of earth,

      They see the ages pass and are the same.

      The wise think with the cycles, they hear the tread

      Of far-off things; patient, unmoved they keep

      Their dangerous wisdom in their depths restrained,

      Lest man’s frail days into the unknown should sink

      Dragged like a ship by bound leviathan

      Into the abyss of his stupendous seas.

      Lo, how all shakes when the gods tread too near!

      All moves, is in peril, anguished, torn, upheaved.

      The hurrying aeons would stumble on too swift

      If strength from heaven surprised the imperfect earth

      And veilless knowledge smote these unfit souls.

      The deities have screened their dreadful power:

      God hides his thought and, even, he seems to err.

      Be still and tardy in the slow wise world.

      Mighty art thou with the dread goddess filled,

      To whom thou criedst at dawn in the dim woods.

      Use not thy strength like the wild Titan souls!

      Touch not the seated lines, the ancient laws,

      Respect the calm of great established things.”

      But Savitri replied to the huge god:

      “What is the calm thou vauntst, O Law, O Death?

      Is it not the dull-visioned tread inert

      Of monstrous energies chained in a stark round

      Soulless and stone-eyed with mechanic dreams?

      Vain the soul’s hope if changeless Law is all:

      Ever to the new and the unknown press on

      The speeding aeons justifying God.

      What were earth’s ages if the grey restraint

      Were never broken and glories sprang not forth

      Bursting their obscure seed, while man’s slow life

      Leaped hurried into sudden splendid paths

      By divine words and human gods revealed?

      Impose not upon sentient minds and hearts

      The dull fixity that binds inanimate things.

      Well is the unconscious rule for the animal breeds

      Content to live beneath the immutable yoke;

      Man turns to a nobler walk, a master path.

      I trample on thy law with living feet;

      For to arise in freedom I was born.

      If I am mighty let my force be unveiled

      Equal companion of the dateless powers,

      Or else let my frustrated soul sink down

      Unworthy of Godhead in the original sleep.

      I claim from Time my will’s eternity,

      God from his moments.” Death replied to her,

      “Why should the noble and immortal will

      Stoop to the petty works of transient earth,

      Freedom forgotten and the Eternal’s path?

      Or is this the high use of strength and thought,

      To struggle with the bonds of death and time

      And spend the labour that might earn the gods

      And battle and bear agony of wounds

      To grasp the trivial joys that earth can guard

      In her small treasure-chest of passing things?

      Child, hast thou trodden the gods beneath thy feet

      Only to win poor shreds of earthly life

      For him thou lov’st cancelling the grand release,

      Keeping from early rapture of the heavens

      His soul the lenient deities have called?

      Are thy arms sweeter than the courts of God?”

      She answered, “Straight I trample on the road

      The strong hand hewed for me which planned our paths.

      I run where his sweet dreadful voice commands

      And I am driven by the reins of God.

      Why drew he wide his scheme of mighty worlds

      Or filled infinity with his passionate breath?

      Or wherefore did he build my mortal form

      And sow in me his bright and proud desires,

      If not to achieve, to flower in me, to love,

      Carving his human image richly shaped

      In thoughts and largenesses and golden powers?

      Far Heaven can wait our coming in its calm.

      Easy the heavens were to build for God.

      Earth was his difficult matter, earth the glory

      Gave of the problem and the race and strife.

      There are the ominous masks, the terrible powers;

      There it is greatness to create the gods.

      Is not the spirit immortal and absolved

      Always, delivered from the grasp of Time?

      Why came it down into the mortal’s Space?

      A charge he gave to his high spirit in man

      And wrote a hidden decree on Nature’s tops.

      Freedom is this with ever seated soul,

      Large in life’s limits, strong in Matter’s knots,

      Building great stuff of action from the worlds

      To make fine wisdom from coarse, scattered strands

      And love and beauty out of war and night,

      The wager wonderful, the game divine.

      What liberty has the soul which feels not free

      Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds

      The Lover winds around his playmate’s limbs,

      Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?

      To seize him better with her boundless heart

      She accepts the limiting circle of his arms,

      Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands

      And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most free.

      This is my answer to thy lures, O Death.”

      Immutable, Death’s denial met her cry:

      “However mighty, whatever thy secret name

      Uttered in hidden conclaves of the gods,