Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

without danger beautiful

      In lands where siren Wonder sings its lures

      From rhythmic rocks in ever-foaming seas.

      In the harmony of an original sight

      Delivered from our limiting ray of thought,

      And the reluctance of our blinded hearts

      To embrace the Godhead in whatever guise,

      She saw all Nature marvellous without fault.

      Invaded by beauty’s universal revel

      Her being’s fibre reached out vibrating

      And claimed deep union with its outer selves,

      And on the heart’s chords made pure to seize all tones

      Heaven’s subtleties of touch unwearying forced

      More vivid raptures than earth’s life can bear.

      What would be suffering here, was fiery bliss.

      All here but passionate hint and mystic shade

      Divined by the inner prophet who perceives

      The spirit of delight in sensuous things,

      Turned to more sweetness than can now be dreamed.

      The mighty signs of which earth fears the stress,

      Trembling because she cannot understand,

      And must keep obscure in forms strange and sublime,

      Were here the first lexicon of an infinite mind

      Translating the language of eternal bliss.

      Here rapture was a common incident;

      The lovelinesses of whose captured thrill

      Our human pleasure is a fallen thread,

      Lay, symbol shapes, a careless ornament,

      Sewn on the rich brocade of Godhead’s dress.

      Things fashioned were the imaged homes where mind

      Arrived to fathom a deep physical joy;

      The heart was a torch lit from infinity,

      The limbs were trembling densities of soul.

      These were the first domains, the outer courts

      Immense but least in range and least in price,

      The slightest ecstasies of the undying gods.

      Higher her swing of vision swept and knew,

      Admitted through large sapphire opening gates

      Into the wideness of a light beyond,

      These were but sumptuous decorated doors

      To worlds nobler, more felicitously fair.

      Endless aspired the climbing of those heavens;

      Realm upon realm received her soaring view.

      Then on what seemed one crown of the ascent

      Where finite and the infinite are one,

      Immune she beheld the strong immortals’ seats

      Who live for a celestial joy and rule,

      The middle regions of the unfading Ray.

      Great forms of deities sat in deathless tiers,

      Eyes of an unborn gaze towards her leaned

      Through a transparency of crystal fire.

      In the beauty of bodies wrought from rapture’s lines,

      Shapes of entrancing sweetness spilling bliss,

      Feet glimmering upon the sunstone courts of mind,

      Heaven’s cupbearers bore round the Eternal’s wine.

      A tangle of bright bodies, of moved souls

      Tracing the close and intertwined delight,

      The harmonious tread of lives for ever joined

      In the passionate oneness of a mystic joy

      As if sunbeams made living and divine,

      The golden-bosomed Apsara goddesses,

      In groves flooded from an argent disk of bliss

      That floated through a luminous sapphire dream,

      In a cloud of raiment lit with golden limbs

      And gleaming footfalls treading faery swards,

      Virgin motions of bacchant innocences

      Who know their riot for a dance of God,

      Whirled linked in moonlit revels of the heart.

      Impeccable artists of unerring forms,

      Magician builders of sound and rhythmic words,

      Wind-haired Gandharvas chanted to the ear

      The odes that shape the universal thought,

      The lines that tear the veil from Deity’s face,

      The rhythms that bring the sounds of wisdom’s sea.

      Immortal figures and illumined brows,

      Our great forefathers in those splendours moved;

      Termless in power and satisfied of light,

      They enjoyed the sense of all for which we strive.

      High seers, moved poets saw the eternal thoughts

      That, travellers from on high, arrive to us

      Deformed by our search, tricked by costuming mind,

      Like gods disfigured by the pangs of birth,

      Seized the great words which now are frail sounds caught

      By difficult rapture on a mortal tongue.

      The strong who stumble and sin were calm proud gods.

      There lightning-filled with glory and with flame,

      Melting in waves of sympathy and sight,

      Smitten like a lyre that throbs to others’ bliss,

      Drawn by the cords of ecstasies unknown,

      Her human nature faint with heaven’s delight,

      She beheld the clasp to earth denied and bore

      The imperishable eyes of veilless love.

      More climbed above, level to level reached,

      Beyond what tongue can utter or mind dream:

      Worlds of an infinite reach crowned Nature’s stir.

      There was a greater tranquil sweetness there,

      A subtler and profounder ether’s field

      And mightier scheme than heavenliest sense can give.

      There breath carried a stream of seeing mind,

      Form was a tenuous raiment of the soul:

      Colour was a visible tone of ecstasy;

      Shapes seen half immaterial by the gaze

      And yet voluptuously palpable

      Made sensible to touch the indwelling spirit.

      The high perfected sense illumined lived

      A happy vassal of the inner ray,

      Each feeling was the Eternal’s mighty child

      And every thought was a sweet burning god.

      Air was a luminous feeling, sound a voice,

      Sunlight