Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

heart’s ephemeral passion cannot break

      The iron rampart of accomplished things

      With which the great Gods fence their camp in Space.

      Whoever thou art behind thy human mask,

      Even if thou art the Mother of the worlds

      And pegst thy claim upon the realms of Chance,

      The cosmic Law is greater than thy will.

      Even God himself obeys the Laws he made:

      The Law abides and never can it change,

      The Person is a bubble on Time’s sea.

      A forerunner of a greater Truth to come,

      Thy soul creator of its freer Law,

      Vaunting a Force behind on which it leans,

      A Light above which none but thou hast seen,

      Thou claimst the first fruits of Truth’s victory.

      But what is Truth and who can find her form

      Amid the specious images of sense,

      Amid the crowding guesses of the mind

      And the dark ambiguities of a world

      Peopled with the incertitudes of Thought?

      For where is Truth and when was her footfall heard

      Amid the endless clamour of Time’s mart

      And which is her voice amid the thousand cries

      That cross the listening brain and cheat the soul?

      Or is Truth aught but a high starry name

      Or a vague and splendid word by which man’s thought

      Sanctions and consecrates his nature’s choice,

      The heart’s wish donning knowledge as its robe,

      The cherished idea elect among the elect,

      Thought’s favourite mid the children of half-light

      Who high-voiced crowd the playgrounds of the mind

      Or people its dormitories in infant sleep?

      All things hang here between God’s yes and no,

      Two Powers real but to each other untrue,

      Two consort stars in the mooned night of mind

      That towards two opposite horizons gaze,

      The white head and black tail of the mystic drake,

      The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken

      Sustaining the body of the uncertain world,

      A great surreal dragon in the skies.

      Too dangerously thy high proud truth must live

      Entangled in Matter’s mortal littleness.

      All in this world is true, yet all is false:

      Its thoughts into an eternal cipher run,

      Its deeds swell to Time’s rounded zero sum.

      Thus man at once is animal and god,

      A disparate enigma of God’s make

      Unable to free the Godhead’s form within,

      A being less than himself, yet something more,

      The aspiring animal, the frustrate god

      Yet neither beast nor deity but man,

      But man tied to the kind earth’s labour strives to exceed

      Climbing the stairs of God to higher things.

      Objects are seemings and none knows their truth,

      Ideas are guesses of an ignorant god.

      Truth has no home in earth’s irrational breast:

      Yet without reason life is a tangle of dreams,

      But reason is poised above a dim abyss

      And stands at last upon a plank of doubt.

      Eternal truth lives not with mortal men.

      Or if she dwells within thy mortal heart,

      Show me the body of the living Truth

      Or draw for me the outline of her face

      That I too may obey and worship her.

      Then will I give thee back thy Satyavan.

      But here are only facts and steel-bound Law.

      This truth I know that Satyavan is dead

      And even thy sweetness cannot lure him back.

      No magic Truth can bring the dead to life,

      No power of earth cancel the thing once done,

      No joy of the heart can last surviving death,

      No bliss persuade the past to live again.

      But Life alone can solace the mute Void

      And fill with thought the emptiness of Time.

      Leave then thy dead, O Savitri, and live.”

      The Woman answered to the mighty Shade,

      And as she spoke, mortality disappeared;

      Her Goddess self grew visible in her eyes,

      Light came, a dream of heaven, into her face.

      “O Death, thou too art God and yet not He,

      But only his own black shadow on his path

      As leaving the Night he takes the upward Way

      And drags with him its clinging inconscient Force.

      Of God unconscious thou art the dark head,

      Of his Ignorance thou art the impenitent sign,

      Of its vast tenebrous womb the natural child,

      On his immortality the sinister bar.

      All contraries are aspects of God’s face.

      The Many are the innumerable One,

      The One carries the multitude in his breast;

      He is the Impersonal, inscrutable, sole,

      He is the one infinite Person seeing his world;

      The Silence bears the Eternal’s great dumb seal,

      His light inspires the eternal Word;

      He is the Immobile’s deep and deathless hush,

      Its white and signless blank negating calm,

      Yet stands the creator Self, the almighty Lord

      And watches his will done by the forms of Gods

      And the desire that goads half-conscious man

      And the reluctant and unseeing Night.

      These wide divine extremes, these inverse powers

      Are the right and left side of the body of God;

      Existence balanced twixt two mighty arms

      Confronts the mind with unsolved abysms of Thought.

      Darkness below, a fathomless Light above,

      In Light are joined, but sundered by severing Mind

      Stand face to face, opposite, inseparable,

      Two contraries needed for his great World-task,

      Two poles whose currents wake the immense World-Force.

      In the stupendous secrecy of his