Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

made his spur to fragile human works

      Which yet outlast their brief creator’s breath.

      He dreams sometimes of the revels of the gods

      And sees the Dionysian gesture pass, –

      A leonine greatness that would tear his soul

      If through his failing limbs and fainting heart

      The sweet and joyful mighty madness swept:

      Trivial amusements stimulate and waste

      The energy given to him to grow and be.

      His little hour is spent in little things.

      A brief companionship with many jars,

      A little love and jealousy and hate,

      A touch of friendship mid indifferent crowds

      Draw his heart-plan on life’s diminutive map.

      If something great awakes, too frail his pitch

      To reveal its zenith tension of delight,

      His thought to eternise its ephemeral soar,

      Art’s brilliant gleam is a pastime for his eyes,

      A thrill that smites the nerves is music’s spell.

      Amidst his harassed toil and welter of cares,

      Pressed by the labour of his crowding thoughts,

      He draws sometimes around his aching brow

      Nature’s calm mighty hands to heal his life-pain.

      He is saved by her silence from his rack of self;

      In her tranquil beauty is his purest bliss.

      A new life dawns, he looks out from vistas wide;

      The Spirit’s breath moves him but soon retires:

      His strength was not made to hold that puissant guest.

      All dulls down to convention and routine

      Or a fierce excitement brings him vivid joys:

      His days are tinged with the red hue of strife

      And lust’s hot glare and passion’s crimson stain;

      Battle and murder are his tribal game.

      Time has he none to turn his eyes within

      And look for his lost self and his dead soul.

      His motion on too short an axis wheels;

      He cannot soar but creeps on his long road

      Or if, impatient of the trudge of Time,

      He would make a splendid haste on Fate’s slow road,

      His heart that runs soon pants and tires and sinks;

      Or he walks ever on and finds no end.

      Hardly a few can climb to greater life.

      All tunes to a low scale and conscious pitch.

      His knowledge dwells in the house of Ignorance;

      His force nears not even once the Omnipotent,

      Rare are his visits of heavenly ecstasy.

      The bliss which sleeps in things and tries to wake,

      Breaks out in him in a small joy of life:

      This scanty grace is his persistent stay;

      It lightens the burden of his many ills

      And reconciles him to his little world.

      He is satisfied with his common average kind;

      Tomorrow’s hopes and his old rounds of thought,

      His old familiar interests and desires

      He has made into a thick and narrowing hedge

      Defending his small life from the Invisible;

      His being’s kinship to infinity

      He has shut away from him into inmost self,

      Fenced off the greatnesses of hidden God.

      His being was formed to play a trivial part

      In a little drama on a petty stage;

      In a narrow plot he has pitched his tent of life

      Beneath the wide gaze of the starry Vast.

      He is the crown of all that has been done:

      Thus is creation’s labour justified;

      This is the world’s result, Nature’s last poise!

      And if this were all and nothing more were meant,

      If what now seems were the whole of what must be,

      If this were not a stade through which we pass

      On our road from Matter to eternal Self,

      To the Light that made the worlds, the Cause of things,

      Well might interpret our mind’s limited view

      Existence as an accident in Time,

      Illusion or phenomenon or freak,

      The paradox of a creative Thought

      Which moves between unreal opposites,

      Inanimate Force struggling to feel and know,

      Matter that chanced to read itself by Mind,

      Inconscience monstrously engendering soul.

      At times all looks unreal and remote:

      We seem to live in a fiction of our thoughts

      Pieced from sensation’s fanciful traveller’s tale,

      Or caught on the film of the recording brain,

      A figment or circumstance in cosmic sleep.

      A somnambulist walking under the moon,

      An image of ego treads through an ignorant dream

      Counting the moments of a spectral Time.

      In a false perspective of effect and cause,

      Trusting to a specious prospect of world-space,

      It drifts incessantly from scene to scene,

      Whither it knows not, to what fabulous verge.

      All here is dreamed or doubtfully exists,

      But who the dreamer is and whence he looks

      Is still unknown or only a shadowy guess.

      Or the world is real but ourselves too small,

      Insufficient for the mightiness of our stage.

      A thin life-curve crosses the titan whirl

      Of the orbit of a soulless universe,

      And in the belly of the sparse rolling mass

      A mind looks out from a small casual globe

      And wonders what itself and all things are.

      And yet to some interned subjective sight

      That strangely has formed in Matter’s sightless stuff,

      A pointillage minute of little self

      Takes figure as world-being’s conscious base.

      Such is our scene in the half-light below.

      This is the sign of Matter’s infinite,

      This the weird purport of the picture shown

      To Science the giantess, measurer of her field,

      As