Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      Chapters of her metaphysical romance

      Of the soul’s search for lost Reality

      And her fictions drawn from spirit’s authentic fact,

      Her caprices and conceits and meanings locked,

      Her rash unseizable freaks and mysteried turns.

      The magnificent wrappings of her secrecy

      That fold her desirable body out of sight,

      The strange significant forms woven on her robe,

      Her meaningful outlines of the souls of things

      He saw, her false transparencies of thought-hue,

      Her rich brocades with imaged fancies sewn

      And mutable masks and broideries of disguise.

      A thousand baffling faces of the Truth

      Looked at him from her forms with unknown eyes

      And wordless mouths unrecognisable,

      Spoke from the figures of her masquerade,

      Or peered from the recondite magnificence

      And subtle splendour of her draperies.

      In sudden scintillations of the Unknown,

      Inexpressive sounds became veridical,

      Ideas that seemed unmeaning flashed out truth;

      Voices that came from unseen waiting worlds

      Uttered the syllables of the Unmanifest

      To clothe the body of the mystic Word,

      And wizard diagrams of the occult Law

      Sealed some precise unreadable harmony,

      Or used hue and figure to reconstitute

      The herald blazon of Time’s secret things.

      In her green wildernesses and lurking depths,

      In her thickets of joy where danger clasps delight,

      He glimpsed the hidden wings of her songster hopes,

      A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire.

      In her covert lanes, bordering her chance field-paths

      And by her singing rivulets and calm lakes

      He found the glow of her golden fruits of bliss

      And the beauty of her flowers of dream and muse.

      As if a miracle of heart’s change by joy

      He watched in the alchemist radiance of her suns

      The crimson outburst of one secular flower

      On the tree-of-sacrifice of spiritual love.

      In the sleepy splendour of her noons he saw,

      A perpetual repetition through the hours,

      Thought’s dance of dragonflies on mystery’s stream

      That skim but never test its murmurs’ race,

      And heard the laughter of her rose desires

      Running as if to escape from longed-for hands,

      Jingling sweet anklet-bells of fantasy.

      Amidst live symbols of her occult power

      He moved and felt them as close real forms:

      In that life more concrete than the lives of men

      Throbbed heart-beats of the hidden reality:

      Embodied was there what we but think and feel,

      Self-framed what here takes outward borrowed shapes.

      A comrade of Silence on her austere heights

      Accepted by her mighty loneliness,

      He stood with her on meditating peaks

      Where life and being are a sacrament

      Offered to the Reality beyond,

      And saw her loose into infinity

      Her hooded eagles of significance,

      Messengers of Thought to the Unknowable.

      Identified in soul-vision and soul-sense,

      Entering into her depths as into a house,

      All he became that she was or longed to be,

      He thought with her thoughts and journeyed with her steps,

      Lived with her breath and scanned all with her eyes

      That so he might learn the secret of her soul.

      A witness overmastered by his scene,

      He admired her splendid front of pomp and play

      And the marvels of her rich and delicate craft,

      And thrilled to the insistence of her cry;

      Impassioned he bore the sorceries of her might,

      Felt laid on him her abrupt mysterious will,

      Her hands that knead fate in their violent grasp,

      Her touch that moves, her powers that seize and drive.

      But this too he saw, her soul that wept within,

      Her seekings vain that clutch at fleeing truth,

      Her hopes whose sombre gaze mates with despair,

      The passion that possessed her longing limbs,

      The trouble and rapture of her yearning breasts,

      Her mind that toils unsatisfied with its fruits,

      Her heart that captures not the one Beloved.

      Always he met a veiled and seeking Force,

      An exiled goddess building mimic heavens,

      A Sphinx whose eyes look up to a hidden Sun.

      Ever he felt near a spirit in her forms:

      Its passive presence was her nature’s strength;

      This sole is real in apparent things,

      Even upon earth the spirit is life’s key,

      But her solid outsides nowhere bear its trace.

      Its stamp on her acts is undiscoverable.

      A pathos of lost heights is its appeal.

      Only sometimes is caught a shadowy line

      That seems a hint of veiled reality.

      Life stared at him with vague confused outlines

      Offering a picture the eyes could not keep,

      A story that was yet not written there.

      As in a fragmentary half-lost design

      Life’s meanings fled from the pursuing eye.

      Life’s visage hides life’s real self from sight;

      Life’s secret sense is written within, above.

      The thought that gives it sense lives far beyond;

      It is not seen in its half-finished design.

      In vain we hope to read the baffling signs

      Or find the word of the half-played charade.

      Only in that greater life a cryptic thought

      Is found, is hinted some interpreting word

      That makes the earth-myth a tale intelligible.

      Something was seen at last that looked like truth.

      In