Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

of mystic sense,

      It wrote the lines of a significant myth

      Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,

      A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.

      Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed

      Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares;

      A lonely splendour from the invisible goal

      Almost was flung on the opaque Inane.

      Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts;

      Infinity’s centre, a Face of rapturous calm

      Parted the eternal lids that open heaven;

      A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near.

      Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,

      The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths

      That wrap the fated journeyings of the stars

      And saw the spaces ready for her feet.

      Once she half looked behind for her veiled sun,

      Then, thoughtful, went to her immortal work.

      Earth felt the Imperishable’s passage close:

      The waking ear of Nature heard her steps

      And wideness turned to her its limitless eye,

      And, scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile

      Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds.

      All grew a consecration and a rite.

      Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;

      The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind

      Arose and failed upon the altar hills;

      The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.

      Here where our half-lit ignorance skirts the gulfs

      On the dumb bosom of the ambiguous earth,

      Here where one knows not even the step in front

      And Truth has her throne on the shadowy back of doubt,

      On this anguished and precarious field of toil

      Outspread beneath some large indifferent gaze,

      Impartial witness of our joy and bale,

      Our prostrate soil bore the awakening ray.

      Here too the vision and prophetic gleam

      Lit into miracles common meaningless shapes;

      Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew,

      Unwanted, fading from the mortal’s range.

      A sacred yearning lingered in its trace,

      The worship of a Presence and a Power

      Too perfect to be held by death-bound hearts,

      The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.

      Only a little the god-light can stay:

      Spiritual beauty illumining human sight

      Lines with its passion and mystery Matter’s mask

      And squanders eternity on a beat of Time.

      As when a soul draws near the sill of birth,

      Adjoining mortal time to Timelessness,

      A spark of deity lost in Matter’s crypt

      Its lustre vanishes in the inconscient planes,

      That transitory glow of magic fire

      So now dissolved in bright accustomed air.

      The message ceased and waned the messenger.

      The single Call, the uncompanioned Power,

      Drew back into some far-off secret world

      The hue and marvel of the supernal beam:

      She looked no more on our mortality.

      The excess of beauty natural to god-kind

      Could not uphold its claim on time-born eyes;

      Too mystic-real for space-tenancy

      Her body of glory was expunged from heaven:

      The rarity and wonder lived no more.

      There was the common light of earthly day.

      Affranchised from the respite of fatigue

      Once more the rumour of the speed of Life

      Pursued the cycles of her blinded quest.

      All sprang to their unvarying daily acts;

      The thousand peoples of the soil and tree

      Obeyed the unforeseeing instant’s urge,

      And, leader here with his uncertain mind,

      Alone who stares at the future’s covered face,

      Man lifted up the burden of his fate.

      And Savitri too awoke among these tribes

      That hastened to join the brilliant Summoner’s chant

      And, lured by the beauty of the apparent ways,

      Acclaimed their portion of ephemeral joy.

      Akin to the eternity whence she came,

      No part she took in this small happiness;

      A mighty stranger in the human field,

      The embodied Guest within made no response.

      The call that wakes the leap of human mind,

      Its chequered eager motion of pursuit,

      Its fluttering-hued illusion of desire,

      Visited her heart like a sweet alien note.

      Time’s message of brief light was not for her.

      In her there was the anguish of the gods

      Imprisoned in our transient human mould,

      The deathless conquered by the death of things.

      A vaster Nature’s joy had once been hers,

      But long could keep not its gold heavenly hue

      Or stand upon this brittle earthly base.

      A narrow movement on Time’s deep abysm,

      Life’s fragile littleness denied the power,

      The proud and conscious wideness and the bliss

      She had brought with her into the human form,

      The calm delight that weds one soul to all,

      The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy.

      Earth’s grain that needs the sap of pleasure and tears

      Rejected the undying rapture’s boon:

      Offered to the daughter of infinity

      Her passion-flower of love and doom she gave.

      In vain now seemed the splendid sacrifice.

      A prodigal of her rich divinity,

      Her self and all she was she had lent to men,

      Hoping her greater being to implant

      And in their body’s lives acclimatise

      That heaven might native grow on mortal soil.

      Hard is it to persuade earth-nature’s change;

      Mortality bears ill the eternal’s touch:

      It