Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

of a boundless Thought and Force.

      Her timeless Power that lay once on the lap

      Of a beginningless and endless Calm,

      Now severed from the Spirit’s immortal bliss,

      Erects the type of all the joys she has lost;

      Compelling transient substance into shape,

      She hopes by the creative act’s release

      To overleap sometimes the gulf she cannot fill,

      To heal awhile the wound of severance,

      Escape from the moment’s prison of littleness

      And meet the Eternal’s wide sublimities

      In the uncertain time-field portioned here.

      Almost she nears what never can be attained;

      She shuts eternity into an hour

      And fills a little soul with the Infinite;

      The Immobile leans to the magic of her call;

      She stands on a shore in the Illimitable,

      Perceives the formless Dweller in all forms

      And feels around her infinity’s embrace.

      Her task no ending knows; she serves no aim

      But labours driven by a nameless Will

      That came from some unknowable formless Vast.

      This is her secret and impossible task

      To catch the boundless in a net of birth,

      To cast the spirit into physical form,

      To lend speech and thought to the Ineffable;

      She is pushed to reveal the ever Unmanifest.

      Yet by her skill the impossible has been done:

      She follows her sublime irrational plan,

      Invents devices of her magic art

      To find new bodies for the Infinite

      And images of the Unimaginable;

      She has lured the Eternal into the arms of Time.

      Even now herself she knows not what she has done.

      For all is wrought beneath a baffling mask:

      A semblance other than its hidden truth

      The aspect wears of an illusion’s trick,

      A feigned time-driven unreality,

      The unfinished creation of a changing soul

      In a body changing with the inhabitant.

      Insignificant her means, infinite her work;

      On a great field of shapeless consciousness

      In little finite strokes of mind and sense

      An endless Truth she endlessly unfolds;

      A timeless mystery works out in Time.

      The greatness she has dreamed her acts have missed,

      Her labour is a passion and a pain,

      A rapture and pang, her glory and her curse;

      And yet she cannot choose but labours on;

      Her mighty heart forbids her to desist.

      As long as the world lasts her failure lives

      Astonishing and foiling Reason’s gaze,

      A folly and a beauty unspeakable,

      A superb madness of the will to live,

      A daring, a delirium of delight.

      This is her being’s law, its sole resource;

      She sates, though satisfaction never comes,

      Her hungry will to lavish everywhere

      Her many-imaged fictions of the Self

      And thousand fashions of one Reality.

      A world she made touched by truth’s fleeing hem,

      A world cast into a dream of what it seeks,

      An icon of truth, a conscious mystery’s shape.

      It lingered not like the earth-mind hemmed in

      In solid barriers of apparent fact;

      It dared to trust the dream-mind and the soul.

      A hunter of spiritual verities

      Still only thought or guessed or held by faith,

      It seized in imagination and confined

      A painted bird of paradise in a cage.

      This greater life is enamoured of the Unseen;

      It calls to some highest Light beyond its reach,

      It can feel the Silence that absolves the soul;

      It feels a saviour touch, a ray divine:

      Beauty and good and truth its godheads are.

      It is near to heavenlier heavens than earth’s eyes see,

      A direr darkness than man’s life can bear:

      It has kinship with the demon and the god.

      A strange enthusiasm has moved its heart;

      It hungers for heights, it passions for the supreme.

      It hunts for the perfect word, the perfect shape,

      It leaps to the summit thought, the summit light.

      For by the form the Formless is brought close

      And all perfection fringes the Absolute.

      A child of heaven who never saw his home,

      Its impetus meets the eternal at a point:

      It can only near and touch, it cannot hold;

      It can only strain towards some bright extreme:

      Its greatness is to seek and to create.

      On every plane, this Greatness must create.

      On earth, in heaven, in hell she is the same;

      Of every fate she takes her mighty part.

      A guardian of the fire that lights the suns,

      She triumphs in her glory and her might:

      Opposed, oppressed she bears God’s urge to be born:

      The spirit survives upon non-being’s ground,

      World-force outlasts world-disillusion’s shock:

      Dumb, she is still the Word, inert the Power.

      Here fallen, a slave of death and ignorance,

      To things deathless she is driven to aspire

      And moved to know even the Unknowable.

      Even nescient, null, her sleep creates a world.

      When most unseen, most mightily she works;

      Housed in the atom, buried in the clod,

      Her quick creative passion cannot cease.

      Inconscience is her long gigantic pause,

      Her cosmic swoon is a stupendous phase:

      Time-born, she hides her immortality;

      In death, her bed, she waits the hour to rise.

      Even with the Light denied that sent her forth

      And the hope dead she needed for her task,

      Even