Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

and mythic air

      Denuded of her sweet magnificent suns.

      In worlds imagined, never yet made true,

      A lingering glimmer on creation’s verge,

      One strayed and dreamed and never stopped to achieve:

      To achieve would have destroyed that magic Space.

      The marvels of a twilight wonderland

      Full of a beauty strangely, vainly made,

      A surge of fanciful realities,

      Dim tokens of a Splendour sealed above,

      Awoke the passion of the eyes’ desire,

      Compelled belief on the enamoured thought

      And drew the heart but led it to no goal.

      A magic flowed as if of moving scenes

      That kept awhile their fugitive delicacy

      Of sparing lines limned by an abstract art

      In a rare scanted light with faint dream-brush

      On a silver background of incertitude.

      An infant glow of heavens near to morn,

      A fire intense conceived but never lit,

      Caressed the air with ardent hints of day.

      The perfect longing for imperfection’s charm,

      The illumined caught by the snare of Ignorance,

      Ethereal creatures drawn by body’s lure

      To that region of promise, beating invisible wings,

      Came hungry for the joy of finite life

      But too divine to tread created soil

      And share the fate of perishable things.

      The Children of the unembodied Gleam

      Arisen from a formless thought in the soul

      And chased by an imperishable desire,

      Traversed the field of the pursuing gaze.

      A Will that unpersisting failed, worked there:

      Life was a search but finding never came.

      There nothing satisfied, but all allured,

      Things seemed to be that never wholly are,

      Images were seen that looked like living acts

      And symbols hid the sense they claimed to show,

      Pale dreams grew real to the dreamer’s eyes.

      The souls came there that vainly strive for birth,

      And spirits entrapped might wander through all time,

      Yet never find the truth by which they live.

      All ran like hopes that hunt a lurking chance;

      Nothing was solid, nothing felt complete:

      All was unsafe, miraculous and half-true.

      It seemed a realm of lives that had no base.

      Then dawned a greater seeking, broadened sky,

      A journey under wings of brooding Force.

      First came the kingdom of the morning star:

      A twilight beauty trembled under its spear

      And the throb of promise of a wider Life.

      Then slowly rose a great and doubting sun

      And in its light she made of self a world.

      A spirit was there that sought for its own deep self,

      Yet was content with fragments pushed in front

      And parts of living that belied the whole

      But, pieced together, might one day be true.

      Yet something seemed to be achieved at last.

      A growing volume of the will-to-be,

      A text of living and a graph of force,

      A script of acts, a song of conscious forms

      Burdened with meanings fugitive from thought’s grasp

      And crowded with undertones of life’s rhythmic cry,

      Could write itself on the hearts of living things.

      In an outbreak of the might of secret Spirit,

      In Life and Matter’s answer of delight,

      Some face of deathless beauty could be caught

      That gave immortality to a moment’s joy,

      Some word that could incarnate highest Truth

      Leaped out from a chance tension of the soul,

      Some hue of the Absolute could fall on life,

      Some glory of knowledge and intuitive sight,

      Some passion of the rapturous heart of Love.

      A hierophant of the bodiless Secrecy

      Interned in an unseen spiritual sheath,

      The Will that pushes sense beyond its scope

      To feel the light and joy intangible,

      Half found its way into the Ineffable’s peace,

      Half captured a sealed sweetness of desire

      That yearned from a bosom of mysterious Bliss,

      Half manifested veiled Reality.

      A soul not wrapped into its cloak of mind

      Could glimpse the true sense of a world of forms;

      Illumined by a vision in the thought,

      Upbuoyed by the heart’s understanding flame,

      It could hold in the conscious ether of the spirit

      The divinity of a symbol universe.

      This realm inspires us with our vaster hopes;

      Its forces have made landings on our globe,

      Its signs have traced their pattern in our lives:

      It lends a sovereign movement to our fate,

      Its errant waves motive our life’s high surge.

      All that we seek for is prefigured there

      And all we have not known nor ever sought

      Which yet one day must be born in human hearts

      That the Timeless may fulfil itself in things.

      Incarnate in the mystery of the days,

      Eternal in an unclosed Infinite,

      A mounting endless possibility

      Climbs high upon a topless ladder of dream

      For ever in the Being’s conscious trance.

      All on that ladder mounts to an unseen end.

      An Energy of perpetual transience makes

      The journey from which no return is sure,

      The pilgrimage of Nature to the Unknown.

      As if in her ascent to her lost source

      She hoped to unroll all that could ever be,

      Her high procession moves from stage to stage,

      A progress leap from sight to greater sight,

      A process march from form to ampler form,

      A caravan of the inexhaustible

      Formations