Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

creatures with delight and hope

      A half-awakened Nescience struggled there

      To know by sight and touch the outside of things.

      Instinct was formed; in memory’s crowded sleep

      The past lived on as in a bottomless sea:

      Inverting into half-thought the quickened sense

      She felt around for truth with fumbling hands,

      Clutched to her the little she could reach and seize

      And put aside in her subconscient cave.

      So must the dim being grow in light and force

      And rise to his higher destiny at last,

      Look up to God and round at the universe,

      And learn by failure and progress by fall

      And battle with environment and doom,

      By suffering discover his deep soul

      And by possession grow to his own vasts.

      Half-way she stopped and found her path no more.

      Still nothing was achieved but to begin,

      Yet finished seemed the circle of her force.

      Only she had beaten out sparks of ignorance;

      Only the life could think and not the mind,

      Only the sense could feel and not the soul.

      Only was lit some heat of the flame of Life,

      Some joy to be, some rapturous leaps of sense.

      All was an impetus of half-conscious Force,

      A spirit sprawling drowned in dense life-foam,

      A vague self grasping at the shape of things.

      Behind all moved seeking for vessels to hold

      A first raw vintage of the grapes of God,

      On earth’s mud a spilth of the supernal Bliss,

      Intoxicating the stupefied soul and mind

      A heady wine of rapture dark and crude,

      Dim, uncast yet into spiritual form,

      Obscure inhabitant of the world’s blind core,

      An unborn godhead’s will, a mute Desire.

      A third creation now revealed its face.

      A mould of body’s early mind was made.

      A glint of light kindled the obscure World-Force;

      It dowered a driven world with the seeing Idea

      And armed the act with thought’s dynamic point:

      A small thinking being watched the works of Time.

      A difficult evolution from below

      Called a masked intervention from above;

      Else this great, blind inconscient universe

      Could never have disclosed its hidden mind,

      Or even in blinkers worked in beast and man

      The Intelligence that devised the cosmic scheme.

      At first he saw a dim obscure mind-power

      Moving concealed by Matter and dumb life.

      A current thin, it streamed in life’s vast flow

      Tossing and drifting under a drifting sky

      Amid the surge and glimmering tremulous wash,

      Released in splash of sense and feeling’s waves.

      In the deep midst of an insentient world

      Its huddled waves and foam of consciousness ran

      Pressing and eddying through a narrow strait,

      Carrying experience in its crowded pace.

      It flowed emerging into upper light

      From the deep pool of its subliminal birth

      To reach some high existence still unknown.

      There was no thinking self, aim there was none:

      All was unorganised stress and seekings vague.

      Only to the unstable surface rose

      Sensations, stabs and edges of desire

      And passion’s leaps and brief emotion’s cries,

      A casual colloquy of flesh with flesh,

      A murmur of heart to longing wordless heart,

      Glimmerings of knowledge with no shape of thought

      And jets of subconscious will or hunger’s pulls.

      All was dim sparkle on a foaming top:

      It whirled around a drifting shadow-self

      On an inconscient flood of Force in Time.

      Then came the pressure of a seeing Power

      That drew all into a dancing turbid mass

      Circling around a single luminous point,

      Centre of reference in a conscious field,

      Figure of a unitary Light within.

      It lit the impulse of the half-sentient flood,

      Even an illusion gave of fixity

      As if a sea could serve as a firm soil.

      That strange observing Power imposed its sight.

      It forced on flux a limit and a shape,

      It gave its stream a lower narrow bank,

      Drew lines to snare the spirit’s formlessness.

      It fashioned the life-mind of bird and beast,

      The answer of the reptile and the fish,

      The primitive pattern of the thoughts of man.

      A finite movement of the Infinite

      Came winging its way through a wide air of Time;

      A march of knowledge moved in Nescience

      And guarded in the form a separate soul.

      Its right to be immortal it reserved,

      But built a wall against the siege of death

      And threw a hook to clutch eternity.

      A thinking entity appeared in Space.

      A little ordered world broke into view

      Where being had prison-room for act and sight,

      A floor to walk, a clear but scanty range.

      An instrument-personality was born,

      And a restricted clamped intelligence

      Consented to confine in narrow bounds

      Its seeking; it tied the thought to visible things,

      Prohibiting the adventure of the Unseen

      And the soul’s tread through unknown infinities.

      A reflex reason, Nature-habit’s glass

      Illumined life to know and fix its field,

      Accept a dangerous ignorant brevity

      And the inconclusive purpose of its walk

      And profit by the hour’s precarious chance

      In the allotted boundaries of its fate.

      A little joy and knowledge satisfied

      This