Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

from the strain their first wild plaint divined

      And that discover which is yet unsung.

      I know that I can lift man’s soul to God,

      I know that he can bring the Immortal down.

      Our will labours permitted by thy will

      And without thee an empty roar of storm,

      A senseless whirlwind is the Titan’s force

      And without thee a snare the strength of gods.

      Let not the inconscient gulf swallow man’s race

      That through earth’s ignorance struggles towards thy Light.

      O Thunderer with the lightnings of the soul,

      Give not to darkness and to death thy sun,

      Achieve thy wisdom’s hidden firm decree

      And the mandate of thy secret world-wide love.”

      Her words failed lost in thought’s immensities

      Which seized them at the limits of their cry

      And hid their meaning in the distances

      That stir to more than ever speech has won

      From the Unthinkable, end of all our thought,

      And the Ineffable from whom all words come.

      Then with a smile august as noonday heavens

      The godhead of the vision wonderful:

      “How shall earth-nature and man’s nature rise

      To the celestial levels, yet earth abide?

      Heaven and earth towards each other gaze

      Across a gulf that few can cross, none touch,

      Arriving through a vague ethereal mist

      Out of which all things form that move in space,

      The shore that all can see but never reach.

      Heaven’s light visits sometimes the mind of earth;

      Its thoughts burn in her sky like lonely stars;

      In her heart there move celestial seekings soft

      And beautiful like fluttering wings of birds,

      Visions of joy that she can never win

      Traverse the fading mirror of her dreams.

      Faint seeds of light and bliss bear sorrowful flowers,

      Faint harmonies caught from a half-heard song

      Fall swooning mid the wandering voices’ jar,

      Foam from the tossing luminous seas where dwells

      The beautiful and far delight of gods,

      Raptures unknown, a miracled happiness

      Thrill her and pass half-shaped to mind and sense.

      Above her little finite steps she feels,

      Careless of knot or pause, worlds which weave out

      A strange perfection beyond law and rule,

      A universe of self-found felicity,

      An inexpressible rhythm of timeless beats,

      The many-movemented heart-beats of the One,

      Magic of the boundless harmonies of self,

      Order of the freedom of the infinite,

      The wonder-plastics of the Absolute.

      There is the All-Truth and there the timeless bliss.

      But hers are fragments of a star-lost gleam,

      Hers are but careless visits of the gods.

      They are a Light that fails, a Word soon hushed

      And nothing they mean can stay for long on earth.

      There are high glimpses, not the lasting sight.

      A few can climb to an unperishing sun,

      Or live on the edges of the mystic moon

      And channel to earth-mind the wizard ray.

      The heroes and the demigods are few

      To whom the close immortal voices speak

      And to their acts the heavenly clan are near.

      Few are the silences in which Truth is heard,

      Unveiling the timeless utterance in her deeps;

      Few are the splendid moments of the seers.

      Heaven’s call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds;

      The doors of light are sealed to common mind

      And earth’s needs nail to earth the human mass,

      Only in an uplifting hour of stress

      Men answer to the touch of greater things:

      Or, raised by some strong hand to breathe heaven-air,

      They slide back to the mud from which they climbed;

      In the mud of which they are made, whose law they know

      They joy in safe return to a friendly base,

      And, though something in them weeps for glory lost

      And greatness murdered, they accept their fall.

      To be the common man they think the best,

      To live as others live is their delight.

      For most are built on Nature’s early plan

      And owe small debt to a superior plane;

      The human average is their level pitch,

      A thinking animal’s material range.

      In the long ever-mounting hierarchy,

      In the stark economy of cosmic life

      Each creature to its appointed task and place

      Is bound by his nature’s form, his spirit’s force.

      If this were easily disturbed, it would break

      The settled balance of created things;

      The perpetual order of the universe

      Would tremble, and a gap yawn in woven Fate.

      If men were not and all were brilliant gods,

      The mediating stair would then be lost

      By which the spirit awake in Matter winds

      Accepting the circuits of the middle Way,

      By heavy toil and slow aeonic steps

      Reaching the bright miraculous fringe of God,

      Into the glory of the Oversoul.

      My will, my call is there in men and things;

      But the Inconscient lies at the world’s grey back

      And draws to its breast of Night and Death and Sleep.

      Imprisoned in its dark and dumb abyss

      A little consciousness it lets escape

      But jealous of the growing light holds back

      Close to the obscure edges of its cave

      As if a fond ignorant mother kept her child

      Tied to her apron strings of Nescience.

      The Inconscient could not read without man’s mind

      The mystery of the world its sleep has made:

      Man