Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

atomic parcellings of the Infinite

      Near to the dumb beginnings of lost Self,

      He felt the curious small futility

      Of the creation of material things.

      Or, stifled in the Inconscient’s hollow dusk,

      He sounded the mystery dark and bottomless

      Of the enormous and unmeaning deeps

      Whence struggling life in a dead universe rose.

      There in the stark identity lost by mind

      He felt the sealed sense of the insensible world

      And a mute wisdom in the unknowing Night.

      Into the abysmal secrecy he came

      Where darkness peers from her mattress, grey and nude,

      And stood on the last locked subconscient’s floor

      Where Being slept unconscious of its thoughts

      And built the world not knowing what it built.

      There waiting its hour the future lay unknown,

      There is the record of the vanished stars.

      There in the slumber of the cosmic Will

      He saw the secret key of Nature’s change.

      A light was with him, an invisible hand

      Was laid upon the error and the pain

      Till it became a quivering ecstasy,

      The shock of sweetness of an arm’s embrace.

      He saw in Night the Eternal’s shadowy veil,

      Knew death for a cellar of the house of life,

      In destruction felt creation’s hasty pace,

      Knew loss as the price of a celestial gain

      And hell as a short cut to heaven’s gates.

      Then in Illusion’s occult factory

      And in the Inconscient’s magic printing-house

      Torn were the formats of the primal Night

      And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.

      Alive, breathing a deep spiritual breath,

      Nature expunged her stiff mechanical code

      And the articles of the bound soul’s contract,

      Falsehood gave back to Truth her tortured shape.

      Annulled were the tables of the law of Pain,

      And in their place grew luminous characters.

      The skilful Penman’s unseen finger wrote

      His swift intuitive calligraphy;

      Earth’s forms were made his divine documents,

      The wisdom embodied mind could not reveal,

      Inconscience chased from the world’s voiceless breast;

      Transfigured were the fixed schemes of reasoning Thought.

      Arousing consciousness in things inert,

      He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass

      The diamond script of the Imperishable,

      Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things

      A paean-song of the free Infinite

      And the Name, foundation of eternity,

      And traced on the awake exultant cells

      In the ideographs of the Ineffable

      The lyric of the love that waits through Time

      And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss

      And the message of the superconscient Fire.

      Then life beat pure in the corporeal frame;

      The infernal Gleam died and could slay no more.

      Hell split across its huge abrupt façade

      As if a magic building were undone,

      Night opened and vanished like a gulf of dream.

      Into being’s gap scooped out as empty Space

      In which she had filled the place of absent God,

      There poured a wide intimate and blissful Dawn;

      Healed were all things that Time’s torn heart had made

      And sorrow could live no more in Nature’s breast:

      Division ceased to be, for God was there.

      The soul lit the conscious body with its ray,

      Matter and spirit mingled and were one.

      End of Canto Eight

      Canto Nine

      The Paradise of the Life-Gods

      Around him shone a great felicitous Day.

      A lustre of some rapturous Infinite,

      It held in the splendour of its golden laugh

      Regions of the heart’s happiness set free,

      Intoxicated with the wine of God,

      Immersed in light, perpetually divine.

      A favourite and intimate of the Gods

      Obeying the divine command to joy,

      It was the sovereign of its own delight

      And master of the kingdoms of its force.

      Assured of the bliss for which all forms were made,

      Unmoved by fear and grief and the shocks of Fate

      And unalarmed by the breath of fleeting Time

      And unbesieged by adverse circumstance,

      It breathed in a sweet secure unguarded ease

      Free from our body’s frailty inviting death,

      Far from our danger-zone of stumbling Will.

      It needed not to curb its passionate beats;

      Thrilled by the clasp of the warm satisfied sense

      And the swift wonder-rush and flame and cry

      Of the life-impulses’ red magnificent race,

      It lived in a jewel-rhythm of the laughter of God

      And lay on the breast of universal love.

      Immune the unfettered Spirit of Delight

      Pastured his gleaming sun-herds and moon-flocks

      Along the lyric speed of griefless streams

      In fragrance of the unearthly asphodel.

      A silence of felicity wrapped the heavens,

      A careless radiance smiled upon the heights;

      A murmur of inarticulate ravishment

      Trembled in the winds and touched the enchanted soil;

      Incessant in the arms of ecstasy

      Repeating its sweet involuntary note

      A sob of rapture flowed along the hours.

      Advancing under an arch of glory and peace,

      Traveller on plateau and on musing ridge,

      As one who sees in the World-Magician’s glass

      A miracled imagery of soul-scapes flee

      He traversed scenes of an