Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

a strange irised glow,

      And bright dews drip from the Immortal’s sky.

      A passage for the Powers that move our days,

      Occult behind this grosser Nature’s walls,

      A gossamer marriage-hall of Mind with Form

      Is hidden by a tapestry of dreams;

      Heaven’s meanings steal through it as through a veil,

      Its inner sight sustains this outer scene.

      A finer consciousness with happier lines,

      It has a tact our touch cannot attain,

      A purity of sense we never feel;

      Its intercession with the eternal Ray

      Inspires our transient earth’s brief-lived attempts

      At beauty and the perfect shape of things.

      In rooms of the young divinity of power

      And early play of the eternal Child

      The embodiments of his outwinging thoughts

      Laved in a bright everlasting wonder’s tints

      And lulled by whispers of that lucid air

      Take dream-hued rest like birds on timeless trees

      Before they dive to float on earth-time’s sea.

      All that here seems has lovelier semblance there.

      Whatever our hearts conceive, our heads create,

      Some high original beauty forfeiting,

      Thence exiled here consents to an earthly tinge.

      Whatever is here of visible charm and grace

      Finds there its faultless and immortal lines;

      All that is beautiful here is there divine.

      Figures are there undreamed by mortal mind:

      Bodies that have no earthly counterpart

      Traverse the inner eye’s illumined trance

      And ravish the heart with their celestial tread

      Persuading heaven to inhabit that wonder sphere.

      The future’s marvels wander in its gulfs;

      Things old and new are fashioned in those depths:

      A carnival of beauty crowds the heights

      In that magic kingdom of ideal sight.

      In its antechambers of splendid privacy

      Matter and soul in conscious union meet

      Like lovers in a lonely secret place:

      In the clasp of a passion not yet unfortunate

      They join their strength and sweetness and delight

      And mingling make the high and low worlds one.

      Intruder from the formless Infinite

      Daring to break into the Inconscient’s reign,

      The spirit’s leap towards body touches ground.

      As yet unwrapped in earthly lineaments,

      Already it wears outlasting death and birth,

      Convincing the abyss by heavenly form,

      A covering of its immortality

      Alive to the lustre of the wearer’s rank,

      Fit to endure the rub of Change and Time.

      A tissue mixed of the soul’s radiant light

      And Matter’s substance of sign-burdened Force, –

      Imagined vainly in our mind’s thin air

      An abstract phantasm mould of mental make, –

      It feels what earthly bodies cannot feel

      And is more real than this grosser frame.

      After the falling of mortality’s cloak

      Lightened is its weight to heighten its ascent;

      Refined to the touch of finer environments

      It drops old patterned palls of denser stuff,

      Cancels the grip of earth’s descending pull

      And bears the soul from world to higher world,

      Till in the naked ether of the peaks

      The spirit’s simplicity alone is left,

      The eternal being’s first transparent robe.

      But when it must come back to its mortal load

      And the hard ensemble of earth’s experience,

      Then its return resumes that heavier dress.

      For long before earth’s solid vest was forged

      By the technique of the atomic Void,

      A lucent envelope of self-disguise

      Was woven round the secret spirit in things.

      The subtle realms from those bright sheaths are made.

      This wonder-world with all its radiant boon

      Of vision and inviolate happiness,

      Only for expression cares and perfect form;

      Fair on its peaks, it has dangerous nether planes;

      Its light draws towards the verge of Nature’s lapse;

      It lends beauty to the terror of the gulfs

      And fascinating eyes to perilous Gods,

      Invests with grace the demon and the snake.

      Its trance imposes earth’s inconscience,

      Immortal it weaves for us death’s sombre robe

      And authorises our mortality.

      This medium serves a greater Consciousness:

      A vessel of its concealed autocracy,

      It is the subtle ground of Matter’s worlds,

      It is the immutable in their mutable forms,

      In the folds of its creative memory

      It guards the deathless type of perishing things:

      Its lowered potencies found our fallen strengths;

      Its thought invents our reasoned ignorance;

      Its sense fathers our body’s reflexes.

      Our secret breath of untried mightier force,

      The lurking sun of an instant’s inner sight,

      Its fine suggestions are a covert fount

      For our iridescent rich imaginings

      Touching things common with transfiguring hues

      Till even earth’s mud grows rich and warm with the skies

      And a glory gleams from the soul’s decadence.

      Its knowledge is our error’s starting-point;

      Its beauty dons our mud-mask ugliness,

      Its artist good begins our evil’s tale.

      A heaven of creative truths above,

      A cosmos of harmonious dreams between,

      A chaos of dissolving forms below,

      It plunges lost in our inconscient base.

      Out of its fall our denser Matter came.

      Thus