Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

figures of embodied joy

      Traversed wide spaces near to eternity’s sleep.

      Pure mystic voices in beatitude’s hush

      Appealed to Love’s immaculate sweetnesses,

      Calling his honeyed touch to thrill the worlds,

      His blissful hands to seize on Nature’s limbs,

      His sweet intolerant might of union

      To take all beings into his saviour arms,

      Drawing to his pity the rebel and the waif

      To force on them the happiness they refuse.

      A chant hymeneal to the unseen Divine,

      A flaming rhapsody of white desire

      Lured an immortal music into the heart

      And woke the slumbering ear of ecstasy.

      A purer, fierier sense had there its home,

      A burning urge no earthly limbs can hold;

      One drew a large unburdened spacious breath

      And the heart sped from beat to rapturous beat.

      The voice of Time sang of the Immortal’s joy;

      An inspiration and a lyric cry,

      The moments came with ecstasy on their wings;

      Beauty unimaginable moved heaven-bare

      Absolved from boundaries in the vasts of dream;

      The cry of the Birds of Wonder called from the skies

      To the deathless people of the shores of Light.

      Creation leaped straight from the hands of God;

      Marvel and rapture wandered in the ways.

      Only to be was a supreme delight,

      Life was a happy laughter of the soul

      And Joy was king with Love for minister.

      The spirit’s luminousness was bodied there.

      Life’s contraries were lovers or natural friends

      And her extremes keen edges of harmony:

      Indulgence with a tender purity came

      And nursed the god on her maternal breast:

      There none was weak, so falsehood could not live;

      Ignorance was a thin shade protecting light,

      Imagination the free-will of Truth,

      Pleasure a candidate for heaven’s fire;

      The intellect was Beauty’s worshipper,

      Strength was the slave of calm spiritual law,

      Power laid its head upon the breasts of Bliss.

      There were summit-glories inconceivable,

      Autonomies of Wisdom’s still self-rule

      And high dependencies of her virgin sun,

      Illumined theocracies of the seeing soul

      Throned in the power of the Transcendent’s ray.

      A vision of grandeurs, a dream of magnitudes

      In sun-bright kingdoms moved with regal gait:

      Assemblies, crowded senates of the gods,

      Life’s puissances reigned on seats of marble will,

      High dominations and autocracies

      And laurelled strengths and armed imperative mights.

      All objects there were great and beautiful,

      All beings wore a royal stamp of power.

      There sat the oligarchies of natural Law,

      Proud violent heads served one calm monarch brow:

      All the soul’s postures donned divinity.

      There met the ardent mutual intimacies

      Of mastery’s joy and the joy of servitude

      Imposed by Love on Love’s heart that obeys

      And Love’s body held beneath a rapturous yoke.

      All was a game of meeting kinglinesses.

      For worship lifts the worshipper’s bowed strength

      Close to the god’s pride and bliss his soul adores:

      The ruler there is one with all he rules;

      To him who serves with a free equal heart

      Obedience is his princely training’s school,

      His nobility’s coronet and privilege,

      His faith is a high nature’s idiom,

      His service a spiritual sovereignty.

      There were realms where Knowledge joined creative Power

      In her high home and made her all his own:

      The grand Illuminate seized her gleaming limbs

      And filled them with the passion of his ray

      Till all her body was its transparent house

      And all her soul a counterpart of his soul.

      Apotheosised, transfigured by wisdom’s touch,

      Her days became a luminous sacrifice;

      An immortal moth in happy and endless fire,

      She burned in his sweet intolerable blaze.

      A captive Life wedded her conqueror.

      In his wide sky she built her world anew;

      She gave to mind’s calm pace the motor’s speed,

      To thinking a need to live what the soul saw,

      To living an impetus to know and see.

      His splendour grasped her, her puissance to him clung;

      She crowned the Idea a king in purple robes,

      Put her magic serpent sceptre in Thought’s grip,

      Made forms his inward vision’s rhythmic shapes

      And her acts the living body of his will.

      A flaming thunder, a creator flash,

      His victor Light rode on her deathless Force;

      A centaur’s mighty gallop bore the god.

      Life throned with mind, a double majesty.

      Worlds were there of a happiness great and grave

      And action tinged with dream, laughter with thought,

      And passion there could wait for its desire

      Until it heard the near approach of God.

      Worlds were there of a childlike mirth and joy;

      A carefree youthfulness of mind and heart

      Found in the body a heavenly instrument;

      It lit an aureate halo round desire

      And freed the deified animal in the limbs

      To divine gambols of love and beauty and bliss.

      On a radiant soil that gazed at heaven’s smile

      A swift life-impulse stinted not nor stopped:

      It knew not how to tire; happy were its tears.

      There work was play and play the only work,

      The tasks of