Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

may marry with the Sun,

      Our mortal life ride on the spirit’s wings,

      Our finite thoughts commune with the Infinite.

      In the bright kingdoms of the rising Sun

      All is a birth into a power of light:

      All here deformed guards there its happy shape,

      Here all is mixed and marred, there pure and whole;

      Yet each is a passing step, a moment’s phase.

      Awake to a greater Truth beyond her acts,

      The mediatrix sat and saw her works

      And felt the marvel in them and the force

      But knew the power behind the face of Time:

      She did the task, obeyed the knowledge given,

      Her deep heart yearned towards great ideal things

      And from the light looked out to wider light:

      A brilliant hedge drawn round her narrowed her power;

      Faithful to her limited sphere she toiled, but knew

      Its highest, widest seeing was a half-search,

      Its mightiest acts a passage or a stage.

      For not by Reason was creation made

      And not by Reason can the Truth be seen

      Which through the veils of thought, the screens of sense

      Hardly the spirit’s vision can descry

      Dimmed by the imperfection of its means:

      The little Mind is tied to little things:

      Its sense is but the spirit’s outward touch,

      Half-waked in a world of dark Inconscience;

      It feels out for its beings and its forms

      Like one left fumbling in the ignorant Night.

      In this small mould of infant mind and sense

      Desire is a child-heart’s cry crying for bliss,

      Our reason only a toys’ artificer,

      A rule-maker in a strange stumbling game.

      But she her dwarf aides knew whose confident sight

      A bounded prospect took for the far goal.

      The world she has made is an interim report

      Of a traveller towards the half-found truth in things

      Moving twixt nescience and nescience.

      For nothing is known while aught remains concealed;

      The Truth is known only when all is seen.

      Attracted by the All that is the One,

      She yearns towards a higher light than hers;

      Hid by her cults and creeds she has glimpsed God’s face:

      She knows she has but found a form, a robe,

      But ever she hopes to see him in her heart

      And feel the body of his reality.

      As yet a mask is there and not a brow,

      Although sometimes two hidden eyes appear:

      Reason cannot tear off that glimmering mask,

      Her efforts only make it glimmer more;

      In packets she ties up the Indivisible;

      Finding her hands too small to hold vast Truth

      She breaks up knowledge into alien parts

      Or peers through cloud-rack for a vanished sun:

      She sees, not understanding what she has seen,

      Through the locked visages of finite things

      The myriad aspects of infinity.

      One day the Face must burn out through the mask.

      Our ignorance is Wisdom’s chrysalis,

      Our error weds new knowledge on its way,

      Its darkness is a blackened knot of light;

      Thought dances hand in hand with Nescience

      On the grey road that winds towards the Sun.

      Even while her fingers fumble at the knots

      Which bind them to their strange companionship,

      Into the moments of their married strife

      Sometimes break flashes of the enlightening Fire.

      Even now great thoughts are here that walk alone:

      Armed they have come with the infallible word

      In an investiture of intuitive light

      That is a sanction from the eyes of God;

      Announcers of a distant Truth they flame

      Arriving from the rim of eternity.

      A fire shall come out of the infinitudes,

      A greater Gnosis shall regard the world

      Crossing out of some far omniscience

      On lustrous seas from the still rapt Alone

      To illumine the deep heart of self and things.

      A timeless knowledge it shall bring to Mind,

      Its aim to life, to Ignorance its close.

      Above in a high breathless stratosphere,

      Overshadowing the dwarfish trinity,

      Lived, aspirants to a limitless Beyond,

      Captives of Space, walled by the limiting heavens,

      In the unceasing circuit of the hours

      Yearning for the straight paths of eternity,

      And from their high station looked down on this world

      Two sun-gaze Daemons witnessing all that is.

      A power to uplift the laggard world,

      Imperious rode a huge high-winged Life-Thought

      Unwont to tread the firm unchanging soil:

      Accustomed to a blue infinity,

      It planed in sunlit sky and starlit air;

      It saw afar the unreached Immortal’s home

      And heard afar the voices of the Gods.

      Iconoclast and shatterer of Time’s forts,

      Overleaping limit and exceeding norm,

      It lit the thoughts that glow through the centuries

      And moved to acts of superhuman force.

      As far as its self-winged air-planes could fly,

      Visiting the future in great brilliant raids

      It reconnoitred vistas of dream-fate.

      Apt to conceive, unable to attain,

      It drew its concept-maps and vision-plans

      Too large for the architecture of mortal Space.

      Beyond in wideness where no footing is,

      An imagist of bodiless Ideas,

      Impassive to the cry of life and sense,

      A pure Thought-Mind surveyed the cosmic act.

      Archangel of a white transcending realm,

      It saw the world from solitary heights

      Luminous