Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      And set with chequered sunbeams and blithe flowers

      Immured her destiny’s secluded scene.

      There had she grown to the stature of her spirit:

      The genius of titanic silences

      Steeping her soul in its wide loneliness

      Had shown to her her self’s bare reality

      And mated her with her environment.

      Its solitude greatened her human hours

      With a background of the eternal and unique.

      A force of spare direct necessity

      Reduced the heavy framework of man’s days

      And his overburdening mass of outward needs

      To a first thin strip of simple animal wants,

      And the mighty wildness of the primitive earth

      And the brooding multitude of patient trees

      And the musing sapphire leisure of the sky

      And the solemn weight of the slowly-passing months

      Had left in her deep room for thought and God.

      There was her drama’s radiant prologue lived.

      A spot for the eternal’s tread on earth

      Set in the cloistral yearning of the woods

      And watched by the aspiration of the peaks

      Appeared through an aureate opening in Time,

      Where stillness listening felt the unspoken word

      And the hours forgot to pass towards grief and change.

      Here with the suddenness divine advents have,

      Repeating the marvel of the first descent,

      Changing to rapture the dull earthly round,

      Love came to her hiding the shadow, Death.

      Well might he find in her his perfect shrine.

      Since first the earth-being’s heavenward growth began,

      Through all the long ordeal of the race,

      Never a rarer creature bore his shaft,

      That burning test of the godhead in our parts,

      A lightning from the heights on our abyss.

      All in her pointed to a nobler kind.

      Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven,

      Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit

      Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm

      Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.

      Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;

      Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,

      Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.

      As in a mystic and dynamic dance

      A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

      Inspired and ruled from Truth’s revealing vault

      Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

      A heart of silence in the hands of joy

      Inhabited with rich creative beats

      A body like a parable of dawn

      That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

      Or golden temple-door to things beyond.

      Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;

      Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense

      Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight

      Poured a supernal beauty on men’s lives.

      A wide self-giving was her native act;

      A magnanimity as of sea or sky

      Enveloped with its greatness all that came

      And gave a sense as of a greatened world:

      Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,

      Her high passion a blue heaven’s equipoise.

      As might a soul fly like a hunted bird,

      Escaping with tired wings from a world of storms,

      And a quiet reach like a remembered breast,

      In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose

      One could drink life back in streams of honey-fire,

      Recover the lost habit of happiness,

      Feel her bright nature’s glorious ambience,

      And preen joy in her warmth and colour’s rule.

      A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,

      Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;

      Love in her was wider than the universe,

      The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.

      The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:

      Vacant of the dwarf self’s imprisoned air,

      Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath

      Spiritual that can make all things divine.

      For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.

      At once she was the stillness and the word,

      A continent of self-diffusing peace,

      An ocean of untrembling virgin fire;

      The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.

      In her he found a vastness like his own,

      His high warm subtle ether he refound

      And moved in her as in his natural home.

      In her he met his own eternity.

      Till then no mournful line had barred this ray.

      On the frail breast of this precarious earth,

      Since her orbed sight in its breath-fastened house,

      Opening in sympathy with happier stars

      Where life is not exposed to sorrowful change,

      Remembered beauty death-claimed lids ignore

      And wondered at this world of fragile forms

      Carried on canvas-strips of shimmering Time,

      The impunity of unborn Mights was hers.

      Although she leaned to bear the human load,

      Her walk kept still the measures of the gods.

      Earth’s breath had failed to stain that brilliant glass:

      Unsmeared with the dust of our mortal atmosphere

      It still reflected heaven’s spiritual joy.

      Almost they saw who lived within her light

      Her playmate in the sempiternal spheres

      Descended from its unattainable realms

      In her attracting advent’s luminous wake,

      The white-fire dragon-bird of endless bliss

      Drifting with burning wings above her days:

      Heaven’s tranquil shield guarded the missioned child.

      A glowing orbit was her early term,

      Years like gold raiment of the gods