Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

and himself don the aspect of a myth,

      The burden of a long unmeaning tale.

      For the key is hid and by the Inconscient kept;

      The secret God beneath the threshold dwells.

      In a body obscuring the immortal Spirit

      A nameless Resident vesting unseen powers

      With Matter’s shapes and motives beyond thought

      And the hazard of an unguessed consequence,

      An omnipotent indiscernible Influence,

      He sits, unfelt by the form in which he lives

      And veils his knowledge by the groping mind.

      A wanderer in a world his thoughts have made,

      He turns in a chiaroscuro of error and truth

      To find a wisdom that on high is his.

      As one forgetting he searches for himself;

      As if he had lost an inner light he seeks:

      As a sojourner lingering amid alien scenes

      He journeys to a home he knows no more.

      His own self’s truth he seeks who is the Truth;

      He is the Player who became the play,

      He is the Thinker who became the thought;

      He is the many who was the silent One.

      In the symbol figures of the cosmic Force

      And in her living and inanimate signs

      And in her complex tracery of events

      He explores the ceaseless miracle of himself,

      Till the thousandfold enigma has been solved

      In the single light of an all-witnessing Soul.

      This was his compact with his mighty mate,

      For love of her and joined to her for ever

      To follow the course of Time’s eternity,

      Amid magic dramas of her sudden moods

      And the surprises of her masked Idea

      And the vicissitudes of her vast caprice.

      Two seem his goals, yet ever are they one

      And gaze at each other over bourneless Time;

      Spirit and Matter are their end and source.

      A seeker of hidden meanings in life’s forms,

      Of the great Mother’s wide uncharted will

      And the rude enigma of her terrestrial ways

      He is the explorer and the mariner

      On a secret inner ocean without bourne:

      He is the adventurer and cosmologist

      Of a magic earth’s obscure geography.

      In her material order’s fixed design

      Where all seems sure and, even when changed, the same,

      Even though the end is left for ever unknown

      And ever unstable is life’s shifting flow,

      His paths are found for him by silent fate;

      As stations in the ages’ weltering flood

      Firm lands appear that tempt and stay awhile,

      Then new horizons lure the mind’s advance.

      There comes no close to the finite’s boundlessness,

      There is no last certitude in which thought can pause

      And no terminus to the soul’s experience.

      A limit, a farness never wholly reached,

      An unattained perfection calls to him

      From distant boundaries in the Unseen:

      A long beginning only has been made.

      This is the sailor on the flow of Time,

      This is World-Matter’s slow discoverer,

      Who, launched into this small corporeal birth,

      Has learned his craft in tiny bays of self,

      But dares at last unplumbed infinitudes,

      A voyager upon eternity’s seas.

      In his world-adventure’s crude initial start

      Behold him ignorant of his godhead’s force,

      Timid initiate of its vast design.

      An expert captain of a fragile craft,

      A trafficker in small impermanent wares,

      At first he hugs the shore and shuns the breadths,

      Dares not to affront the far-off perilous main.

      He in a petty coastal traffic plies,

      His pay doled out from port to neighbour port,

      Content with his safe round’s unchanging course,

      He hazards not the new and the unseen.

      But now he hears the sound of larger seas.

      A widening world calls him to distant scenes

      And journeyings in a larger vision’s arc

      And peoples unknown and still unvisited shores.

      On a commissioned keel his merchant hull

      Serves the world’s commerce in the riches of Time

      Severing the foam of a great land-locked sea

      To reach unknown harbour lights in distant climes

      And open markets for life’s opulent arts,

      Rich bales, carved statuettes, hued canvases,

      And jewelled toys brought for an infant’s play

      And perishable products of hard toil

      And transient splendours won and lost by the days.

      Or passing through a gate of pillar-rocks,

      Venturing not yet to cross oceans unnamed

      And journey into a dream of distances

      He travels close to unfamiliar coasts

      And finds new haven in storm-troubled isles,

      Or, guided by a sure compass in his thought,

      He plunges through a bright haze that hides the stars,

      Steering on the trade-routes of Ignorance.

      His prow pushes towards undiscovered shores,

      He chances on unimagined continents:

      A seeker of the islands of the Blest,

      He leaves the last lands, crosses the ultimate seas,

      He turns to eternal things his symbol quest;

      Life changes for him its time-constructed scenes,

      Its images veiling infinity.

      Earth’s borders recede and the terrestrial air

      Hangs round him no longer its translucent veil.

      He has crossed the limit of mortal thought and hope,

      He has reached the world’s end and stares beyond;

      The eyes of mortal body plunge their gaze

      Into Eyes that look upon eternity.

      A