Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

gift,

      His pure transcendent force submits to hers.

      In the mystery of her cosmic ignorance,

      In the insoluble riddle of her play,

      A creature made of perishable stuff,

      In the pattern she has set for him he moves,

      He thinks with her thoughts, with her trouble his bosom heaves;

      He seems the thing that she would have him seem,

      He is whatever her artist will can make.

      Although she drives him on her fancy’s roads,

      At play with him as with her child or slave,

      To freedom and the Eternal’s mastery

      And immortality’s stand above the world,

      She moves her seeming puppet of an hour.

      Even in his mortal session in body’s house,

      An aimless traveller between birth and death,

      Ephemeral dreaming of immortality,

      To reign she spurs him. He takes up her powers;

      He has harnessed her to the yoke of her own law.

      His face of human thought puts on a crown.

      Held in her leash, bound to her veiled caprice,

      He studies her ways if so he may prevail

      Even for an hour and she work out his will;

      He makes of her his moment passion’s serf:

      To obey she feigns, she follows her creature’s lead:

      For him she was made, lives only for his use.

      But conquering her, then is he most her slave;

      He is her dependent, all his means are hers;

      Nothing without her he can, she rules him still.

      At last he wakes to a memory of Self:

      He sees within the face of deity,

      The Godhead breaks out through the human mould:

      Her highest heights she unmasks and is his mate.

      Till then he is a plaything in her game;

      Her seeming regent, yet her fancy’s toy,

      A living robot moved by her energy’s springs,

      He acts as in the movements of a dream,

      An automaton stepping in the grooves of Fate,

      He stumbles on driven by her whip of Force:

      His thought labours, a bullock in Time’s fields;

      His will he thinks his own, is shaped in her forge.

      Obedient to World-Nature’s dumb control,

      Driven by his own formidable Power,

      His chosen partner in a titan game,

      Her will he has made the master of his fate,

      Her whim the dispenser of his pleasure and pain;

      He has sold himself into her regal power

      For any blow or boon that she may choose:

      Even in what is suffering to our sense,

      He feels the sweetness of her mastering touch,

      In all experience meets her blissful hands;

      On his heart he bears the happiness of her tread

      And the surprise of her arrival’s joy

      In each event and every moment’s chance.

      All she can do is marvellous in his sight:

      He revels in her, a swimmer in her sea,

      A tireless amateur of her world-delight,

      He rejoices in her every thought and act

      And gives consent to all that she can wish;

      Whatever she desires he wills to be:

      The Spirit, the innumerable One,

      He has left behind his lone eternity,

      He is an endless birth in endless Time,

      Her finite’s multitude in an infinite Space.

      The master of existence lurks in us

      And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;

      In Nature’s instrument loiters secret God.

      The Immanent lives in man as in his house;

      He has made the universe his pastime’s field,

      A vast gymnasium of his works of might.

      All-knowing he accepts our darkened state,

      Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;

      Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,

      Immortal, dallies with mortality.

      The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance,

      The All-Blissful bore to be insensible.

      Incarnate in a world of strife and pain,

      He puts on joy and sorrow like a robe

      And drinks experience like a strengthening wine.

      He whose transcendence rules the pregnant Vasts,

      Prescient now dwells in our subliminal depths,

      A luminous individual Power, alone.

      The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

      Has called out of the Silence his mute Force

      Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush

      Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep

      The ineffable puissance of his solitude.

      The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone

      Has entered with his silence into space:

      He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;

      He has built a million figures of his power;

      He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;

      Space is himself and Time is only he.

      The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,

      One who is in us as our secret self,

      Our mask of imperfection has assumed,

      He has made this tenement of flesh his own,

      His image in the human measure cast

      That to his divine measure we might rise;

      Then in a figure of divinity

      The Maker shall recast us and impose

      A plan of godhead on the mortal’s mould

      Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,

      Touching the moment with eternity.

      This transfiguration is earth’s due to heaven:

      A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:

      His nature we must put on as he put ours;

      We are sons of God and must be even as he:

      His human portion, we must grow divine.

      Our life is a paradox with God for key.

      But meanwhile all is a shadow cast by a dream

      And to the musing and immobile