Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

all we have acquired soon loses worth,

      An old disvalued credit in Time’s bank,

      Imperfection’s cheque drawn on the Inconscient.

      An inconsequence dogs every effort made,

      And chaos waits on every cosmos formed:

      In each success a seed of failure lurks.

      He saw the doubtfulness of all things here,

      The incertitude of man’s proud confident thought,

      The transience of the achievements of his force.

      A thinking being in an unthinking world,

      An island in the sea of the Unknown,

      He is a smallness trying to be great,

      An animal with some instincts of a god,

      His life a story too common to be told,

      His deeds a number summing up to nought,

      His consciousness a torch lit to be quenched,

      His hope a star above a cradle and grave.

      And yet a greater destiny may be his,

      For the eternal Spirit is his truth.

      He can re-create himself and all around

      And fashion new the world in which he lives:

      He, ignorant, is the Knower beyond Time,

      He is the Self above Nature, above Fate.

      His soul retired from all that he had done.

      Hushed was the futile din of human toil,

      Forsaken wheeled the circle of the days;

      In distance sank the crowded tramp of life.

      The Silence was his sole companion left.

      Impassive he lived immune from earthly hopes,

      A figure in the ineffable Witness’ shrine

      Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts

      Under its arches dim with infinity

      And heavenward brooding of invisible wings.

      A call was on him from intangible heights;

      Indifferent to the little outpost Mind,

      He dwelt in the wideness of the Eternal’s reign.

      His being now exceeded thinkable Space,

      His boundless thought was neighbour to cosmic sight:

      A universal light was in his eyes,

      A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;

      A Force came down into his mortal limbs,

      A current from eternal seas of Bliss;

      He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.

      Aware of his occult omnipotent Source,

      Allured by the omniscient Ecstasy,

      A living centre of the Illimitable

      Widened to equate with the world’s circumference,

      He turned to his immense spiritual fate.

      Abandoned on a canvas of torn air,

      A picture lost in far and fading streaks,

      The earth-nature’s summits sank below his feet:

      He climbed to meet the infinite more above.

      The Immobile’s ocean-silence saw him pass,

      An arrow leaping through eternity

      Suddenly shot from the tense bow of Time,

      A ray returning to its parent sun.

      Opponent of that glory of escape,

      The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail

      Lashing a slumbrous Infinite by its force

      Into the deep obscurities of form:

      Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep.

      One-pointed to the immaculate Delight,

      Questing for God as for a splendid prey,

      He mounted burning like a cone of fire.

      To a few is given that godlike rare release.

      One among many thousands never touched,

      Engrossed in the external world’s design,

      Is chosen by a secret witness Eye

      And driven by a pointing hand of Light

      Across his soul’s unmapped immensitudes.

      A pilgrim of the everlasting Truth,

      Our measures cannot hold his measureless mind;

      He has turned from the voices of the narrow realm

      And left the little lane of human Time.

      In the hushed precincts of a vaster plan

      He treads the vestibules of the Unseen,

      Or listens following a bodiless Guide

      To a lonely cry in boundless vacancy.

      All the deep cosmic murmur falling still,

      He lives in the hush before the world was born,

      His soul left naked to the timeless One.

      Far from compulsion of created things

      Thought and its shadowy idols disappear,

      The moulds of form and person are undone:

      The ineffable Wideness knows him for its own.

      A lone forerunner of the Godward earth,

      Among the symbols of yet unshaped things

      Watched by closed eyes, mute faces of the Unborn,

      He journeys to meet the Incommunicable,

      Hearing the echo of his single steps

      In the eternal courts of Solitude.

      A nameless Marvel fills the motionless hours.

      His spirit mingles with eternity’s heart

      And bears the silence of the Infinite.

      In a divine retreat from mortal thought,

      In a prodigious gesture of soul-sight,

      His being towered into pathless heights,

      Naked of its vesture of humanity.

      As thus it rose, to meet him bare and pure

      A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, a Flame,

      A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,

      A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire,

      Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs

      And penetrated nerve and heart and brain

      That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany:

      His nature shuddered in the Unknown’s grasp.

      In a moment shorter than death, longer than Time,

      By a Power more ruthless than Love, happier than Heaven,

      Taken sovereignly into eternal arms,

      Haled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss,

      In a whirlwind circuit of delight and force

      Hurried into unimaginable depths,

      Upborne