Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

him earth feels the Godhead drawing near.

      An eyeless Power that sees no more its aim,

      A restless hungry energy of Will,

      Life cast her seed in the body’s indolent mould;

      It woke from happy torpor a blind Force

      Compelling it to sense and seek and feel.

      In the enormous labour of the Void

      Perturbing with her dreams the vast routine

      And dead roll of a slumbering universe

      The mighty prisoner struggled for release.

      Alive with her yearning woke the inert cell,

      In the heart she kindled a fire of passion and need,

      Amid the deep calm of inanimate things

      Arose her great voice of toil and prayer and strife.

      A groping consciousness in a voiceless world,

      A guideless sense was given her for her road;

      Thought was withheld and nothing now she knew,

      But all the unknown was hers to feel and clasp.

      Obeying the push of unborn things towards birth

      Out of her seal of insentient life she broke:

      In her substance of unthinking mute soul-strength

      That cannot utter what its depths divine,

      Awoke a blind necessity to know.

      The chain that bound her she made her instrument;

      Instinct was hers, the chrysalis of Truth,

      And effort and growth and striving nescience.

      Inflicting on the body desire and hope,

      Imposing on inconscience consciousness,

      She brought into Matter’s dull tenacity

      Her anguished claim to her lost sovereign right,

      Her tireless search, her vexed uneasy heart,

      Her wandering unsure steps, her cry for change.

      Adorer of a joy without a name,

      In her obscure cathedral of delight

      To dim dwarf gods she offers secret rites.

      But vain unending is the sacrifice,

      The priest an ignorant mage who only makes

      Futile mutations in the altar’s plan

      And casts blind hopes into a powerless flame.

      A burden of transient gains weighs down her steps

      And hardly under that load can she advance;

      But the hours cry to her, she travels on

      Passing from thought to thought, from want to want;

      Her greatest progress is a deepened need.

      Matter dissatisfies, she turns to Mind;

      She conquers earth, her field, then claims the heavens.

      Insensible, breaking the work she has done

      The stumbling ages over her labour pass,

      But still no great transforming light came down

      And no revealing rapture touched her fall.

      Only a glimmer sometimes splits mind’s sky

      Justifying the ambiguous providence

      That makes of night a path to unknown dawns

      Or a dark clue to some diviner state.

      In Nescience began her mighty task,

      In Ignorance she pursues the unfinished work,

      For knowledge gropes, but meets not Wisdom’s face.

      Ascending slowly with unconscious steps,

      A foundling of the Gods she wanders here

      Like a child-soul left near the gates of Hell

      Fumbling through fog in search of Paradise.

      In this slow ascension he must follow her pace

      Even from her faint and dim subconscious start:

      So only can earth’s last salvation come.

      For so only could he know the obscure cause

      Of all that holds us back and baffles God

      In the jail-delivery of the imprisoned soul.

      Along swift paths of fall through dangerous gates

      He chanced into a grey obscurity

      Teeming with instincts from the mindless gulfs

      That pushed to wear a form and win a place.

      Life here was intimate with Death and Night

      And ate Death’s food that she might breathe awhile;

      She was their inmate and adopted waif.

      Accepting subconscience, in dumb darkness’ reign

      A sojourner, she hoped not any more.

      There far away from Truth and luminous thought

      He saw the original seat, the separate birth

      Of the dethroned, deformed and suffering Power.

      An unhappy face of falsity made true,

      A contradiction of our divine birth,

      Indifferent to beauty and to light,

      Parading she flaunted her animal disgrace

      Unhelped by camouflage, brutal and bare,

      An authentic image recognised and signed

      Of her outcast force exiled from heaven and hope,

      Fallen, glorying in the vileness of her state,

      The grovel of a strength once half divine,

      The graceless squalor of her beast desires,

      The staring visage of her ignorance,

      The naked body of her poverty.

      Here first she crawled out from her cabin of mud

      Where she had lain inconscient, rigid, mute:

      Its narrowness and torpor held her still,

      A darkness clung to her uneffaced by Light.

      There neared no touch redeeming from above:

      The upward look was alien to her sight,

      Forgotten the fearless godhead of her walk;

      Renounced was the glory and felicity,

      The adventure in the dangerous fields of Time:

      Hardly she availed, wallowing, to bear and live.

      A wide unquiet mist of seeking Space,

      A rayless region swallowed in vague swathes,

      That seemed, unnamed, unbodied and unhoused,

      A swaddled visionless and formless mind,

      Asked for a body to translate its soul.

      Its prayer denied, it fumbled after thought.

      As yet not powered to think, hardly to live,

      It opened into a weird and pigmy world

      Where this unhappy magic had its source.

      On dim confines where Life and Matter