Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

their marvel and their multitude.

      These now became new portions of himself,

      The figures of his spirit’s greater life,

      The moving scenery of his large time-walk

      Or the embroidered tissue of his sense:

      These took the place of intimate human things

      And moved as close companions of his thoughts,

      Or were his soul’s natural environment.

      Tireless the heart’s adventure of delight,

      Endless the kingdoms of the Spirit’s bliss,

      Unnumbered tones struck from one harmony’s strings;

      Each to its wide-winged universal poise,

      Its fathomless feeling of the All in one,

      Brought notes of some perfection yet unseen,

      Its single retreat into Truth’s secrecies,

      Its happy sidelight on the Infinite.

      All was found there the Unique has dreamed and made

      Tinging with ceaseless rapture and surprise

      And an opulent beauty of passionate difference

      The recurring beat that moments God in Time.

      Only was missing the sole timeless Word

      That carries eternity in its lonely sound,

      The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,

      The integer of the Spirit’s perfect sum

      That equates the unequal All to the equal One,

      The single sign interpreting every sign,

      The absolute index to the Absolute.

      There walled apart by its own innerness

      In a mystical barrage of dynamic light

      He saw a lone immense high-curved world-pile

      Erect like a mountain-chariot of the Gods

      Motionless under an inscrutable sky.

      As if from Matter’s plinth and viewless base

      To a top as viewless, a carved sea of worlds

      Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme

      Ascended towards breadths immeasurable;

      It hoped to soar into the Ineffable’s reign:

      A hundred levels raised it to the Unknown.

      So it towered up to heights intangible

      And disappeared in the hushed conscious Vast

      As climbs a storeyed temple-tower to heaven

      Built by the aspiring soul of man to live

      Near to his dream of the Invisible.

      Infinity calls to it as it dreams and climbs;

      Its spire touches the apex of the world;

      Mounting into great voiceless stillnesses

      It marries the earth to screened eternities.

      Amid the many systems of the One

      Made by an interpreting creative joy

      Alone it points us to our journey back

      Out of our long self-loss in Nature’s deeps;

      Planted on earth it holds in it all realms:

      It is a brief compendium of the Vast.

      This was the single stair to being’s goal.

      A summary of the stages of the spirit,

      Its copy of the cosmic hierarchies

      Refashioned in our secret air of self

      A subtle pattern of the universe.

      It is within, below, without, above.

      Acting upon this visible Nature’s scheme

      It wakens our earth-matter’s heavy doze

      To think and feel and to react to joy;

      It models in us our diviner parts,

      Lifts mortal mind into a greater air,

      Makes yearn this life of flesh to intangible aims,

      Links the body’s death with immortality’s call:

      Out of the swoon of the Inconscience

      It labours towards a superconscient Light.

      If earth were all and this were not in her,

      Thought could not be nor life-delight’s response:

      Only material forms could then be her guests

      Driven by an inanimate world-force.

      Earth by this golden superfluity

      Bore thinking man and more than man shall bear;

      This higher scheme of being is our cause

      And holds the key to our ascending fate;

      It calls out of our dense mortality

      The conscious spirit nursed in Matter’s house.

      The living symbol of these conscious planes,

      Its influences and godheads of the unseen,

      Its unthought logic of Reality’s acts

      Arisen from the unspoken truth in things,

      Have fixed our inner life’s slow-scaled degrees.

      Its steps are paces of the soul’s return

      From the deep adventure of material birth,

      A ladder of delivering ascent

      And rungs that Nature climbs to deity.

      Once in the vigil of a deathless gaze

      These grades had marked her giant downward plunge,

      The wide and prone leap of a godhead’s fall.

      Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.

      The great World-Mother by her sacrifice

      Has made her soul the body of our state;

      Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness

      Divinity’s lapse from its own splendours wove

      The many-patterned ground of all we are.

      An idol of self is our mortality.

      Our earth is a fragment and a residue;

      Her power is packed with the stuff of greater worlds

      And steeped in their colour-lustres dimmed by her drowse;

      An atavism of higher births is hers,

      Her sleep is stirred by their buried memories

      Recalling the lost spheres from which they fell.

      Unsatisfied forces in her bosom move;

      They are partners of her greater growing fate

      And her return to immortality;

      They consent to share her doom of birth and death;

      They kindle partial gleams of the All and drive

      Her blind laborious spirit to compose

      A meagre image of the mighty Whole.

      The calm and luminous Intimacy within

      Approves her work