Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

by a brief life’s will to act,

      Unharassed by the spur of pity and fear,

      He makes no haste to untie the cosmic knot

      Or the world’s torn jarring heart to reconcile.

      In Time he waits for the Eternal’s hour.

      Yet a spiritual secret aid is there;

      While a tardy Evolution’s coils wind on

      And Nature hews her way through adamant

      A divine intervention thrones above.

      Alive in a dead rotating universe

      We whirl not here upon a casual globe

      Abandoned to a task beyond our force;

      Even through the tangled anarchy called Fate

      And through the bitterness of death and fall

      An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives.

      It is near us in unnumbered bodies and births;

      In its unslackening grasp it keeps for us safe

      The one inevitable supreme result

      No will can take away and no doom change,

      The crown of conscious Immortality,

      The godhead promised to our struggling souls

      When first man’s heart dared death and suffered life.

      One who has shaped this world is ever its lord:

      Our errors are his steps upon the way;

      He works through the fierce vicissitudes of our lives,

      He works through the hard breath of battle and toil,

      He works through our sins and sorrows and our tears,

      His knowledge overrules our nescience;

      Whatever the appearance we must bear,

      Whatever our strong ills and present fate,

      When nothing we can see but drift and bale,

      A mighty Guidance leads us still through all.

      After we have served this great divided world

      God’s bliss and oneness are our inborn right.

      A date is fixed in the calendar of the Unknown,

      An anniversary of the Birth sublime:

      Our soul shall justify its chequered walk,

      All will come near that now is naught or far.

      These calm and distant Mights shall act at last.

      Immovably ready for their destined task,

      The ever-wise compassionate Brilliances

      Await the sound of the Incarnate’s voice

      To leap and bridge the chasms of Ignorance

      And heal the hollow yearning gulfs of Life

      And fill the abyss that is the universe.

      Here meanwhile at the Spirit’s opposite pole

      In the mystery of the deeps that God has built

      For his abode below the Thinker’s sight,

      In this compromise of a stark absolute Truth

      With the Light that dwells near the dark end of things,

      In this tragi-comedy of divine disguise,

      This long far seeking for joy ever near,

      In the grandiose dream of which the world is made,

      In this gold dome on a black dragon base,

      The conscious Force that acts in Nature’s breast,

      A dark-robed labourer in the cosmic scheme

      Carrying clay images of unborn gods,

      Executrix of the inevitable Idea

      Hampered, enveloped by the hoops of Fate,

      Patient trustee of slow eternal Time,

      Absolves from hour to hour her secret charge.

      All she foresees in masked imperative depths;

      The dumb intention of the unconscious gulfs

      Answers to a will that sees upon the heights,

      And the evolving Word’s first syllable

      Ponderous, brute-sensed, contains its luminous close,

      Privy to a summit victory’s vast descent

      And the portent of the soul’s immense uprise.

      All here where each thing seems its lonely self

      Are figures of the sole transcendent One:

      Only by him they are, his breath is their life;

      An unseen Presence moulds the oblivious clay.

      A playmate in the mighty Mother’s game,

      One came upon the dubious whirling globe

      To hide from her pursuit in force and form.

      A secret spirit in the Inconscient’s sleep,

      A shapeless Energy, a voiceless Word,

      He was here before the elements could emerge,

      Before there was light of mind or life could breathe.

      Accomplice of her cosmic huge pretence,

      His semblances he turns to real shapes

      And makes the symbol equal with the truth:

      He gives to his timeless thoughts a form in Time.

      He is the substance, he the self of things;

      She has forged from him her works of skill and might:

      She wraps him in the magic of her moods

      And makes of his myriad truths her countless dreams.

      The Master of being has come down to her,

      An immortal child born in the fugitive years.

      In objects wrought, in the persons she conceives,

      Dreaming she chases her idea of him,

      And catches here a look and there a gest:

      Ever he repeats in them his ceaseless births.

      He is the Maker and the world he made,

      He is the vision and he is the Seer;

      He is himself the actor and the act,

      He is himself the knower and the known,

      He is himself the dreamer and the dream.

      There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;

      In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met

      And light and darkness are their eyes’ interchange;

      Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace,

      Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale;

      They are married secretly in our thought and life.

      The universe is an endless masquerade:

      For nothing here is utterly what it seems;

      It is a dream-fact vision of a truth

      Which but for the dream would not be wholly true,

      A phenomenon stands out significant

      Against dim backgrounds