Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

vast design accepts a puny start.

      An attempt, a drawing half-done is the world’s life;

      Its lines doubt their concealed significance,

      Its curves join not their high intended close.

      Yet some first image of greatness trembles there,

      And when the ambiguous crowded parts have met

      The many-toned unity to which they moved,

      The Artist’s joy shall laugh at reason’s rules;

      The divine intention suddenly shall be seen,

      The end vindicate intuition’s sure technique.

      A graph shall be of many meeting worlds,

      A cube and union-crystal of the gods;

      A Mind shall think behind Nature’s mindless mask,

      A conscious Vast fill the old dumb brute Space.

      This faint and fluid sketch of soul called man

      Shall stand out on the background of long Time

      A glowing epitome of eternity,

      A little point reveal the infinitudes.

      A Mystery’s process is the universe.

      At first was laid a strange anomalous base,

      A void, a cipher of some secret Whole,

      Where zero held infinity in its sum

      And All and Nothing were a single term,

      An eternal negative, a matrix Nought:

      Into its forms the Child is ever born

      Who lives for ever in the vasts of God.

      A slow reversal’s movement then took place:

      A gas belched out from some invisible Fire,

      Of its dense rings were formed these million stars;

      Upon earth’s new-born soil God’s tread was heard.

      Across the thick smoke of earth’s ignorance

      A Mind began to see and look at forms

      And groped for knowledge in the nescient Night:

      Caught in a blind stone-grip Force worked its plan

      And made in sleep this huge mechanical world,

      That Matter might grow conscious of its soul

      And like a busy midwife the life-power

      Deliver the zero carrier of the All.

      Because eternal eyes turned on earth’s gulfs

      The lucent clarity of a pure regard

      And saw a shadow of the Unknowable

      Mirrored in the Inconscient’s boundless sleep,

      Creation’s search for self began its stir.

      A spirit dreamed in the crude cosmic whirl,

      Mind flowed unknowing in the sap of life

      And Matter’s breasts suckled the divine Idea.

      A miracle of the Absolute was born;

      Infinity put on a finite soul,

      All ocean lived within a wandering drop,

      A time-made body housed the Illimitable.

      To live this Mystery out our souls came here.

      A Seer within who knows the ordered plan

      Concealed behind our momentary steps,

      Inspires our ascent to viewless heights

      As once the abysmal leap to earth and life.

      His call had reached the Traveller in Time.

      Apart in an unfathomed loneliness,

      He travelled in his mute and single strength

      Bearing the burden of the world’s desire.

      A formless Stillness called, a nameless Light.

      Above him was the white immobile Ray,

      Around him the eternal Silences.

      No term was fixed to the high-pitched attempt;

      World after world disclosed its guarded powers,

      Heaven after heaven its deep beatitudes,

      But still the invisible Magnet drew his soul.

      A figure sole on Nature’s giant stair,

      He mounted towards an indiscernible end

      On the bare summit of created things.

      End of Canto One

      Canto Two

      The Kingdom of Subtle Matter

      In the impalpable field of secret self,

      This little outer being’s vast support

      Parted from vision by earth’s solid fence,

      He came into a magic crystal air

      And found a life that lived not by the flesh,

      A light that made visible immaterial things.

      A fine degree in wonder’s hierarchy,

      The kingdom of subtle Matter’s faery craft

      Outlined against a sky of vivid hues,

      Leaping out of a splendour-trance and haze,

      The wizard revelation of its front.

      A world of lovelier forms lies near to ours,

      Where, undisguised by earth’s deforming sight,

      All shapes are beautiful and all things true.

      In that lucent ambience mystically clear

      The eyes were doors to a celestial sense,

      Hearing was music and the touch a charm,

      And the heart drew a deeper breath of power.

      There dwell earth-nature’s shining origins:

      The perfect plans on which she moulds her works,

      The distant outcomes of her travailing force,

      Repose in a framework of established fate.

      Attempted vainly now or won in vain,

      Already were mapped and scheduled there the time

      And figure of her future sovereignties

      In the sumptuous lineaments traced by desire.

      The golden issue of mind’s labyrinth plots,

      The riches unfound or still uncaught by our lives,

      Unsullied by the attaint of mortal thought

      Abide in that pellucid atmosphere.

      Our vague beginnings are overtaken there,

      Our middle terms sketched out in prescient lines,

      Our finished ends anticipated live.

      This brilliant roof of our descending plane,

      Intercepting the free boon of heaven’s air,

      Admits small inrushes of a mighty breath

      Or fragrant circuits through gold lattices;

      It shields our ceiling of terrestrial mind

      From deathless suns and the streaming of God’s