Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      Incarnating her beauty in his clasp

      She gave for a brief kiss her immortal lips

      And drew to her bosom one glorified mortal head:

      She made earth her home, for whom heaven was too small.

      In a human breast her occult presence lived;

      He carved from his own self his figure of her:

      She shaped her body to a mind’s embrace.

      Into thought’s narrow limits she has come;

      Her greatness she has suffered to be pressed

      Into the little cabin of the Idea,

      The closed room of a lonely thinker’s grasp:

      She has lowered her heights to the stature of our souls

      And dazzled our lids with her celestial gaze.

      Thus each is satisfied with his high gain

      And thinks himself beyond mortality blest,

      A king of truth upon his separate throne.

      To her possessor in the field of Time

      A single splendour caught from her glory seems

      The one true light, her beauty’s glowing whole.

      But thought nor word can seize eternal Truth:

      The whole world lives in a lonely ray of her sun.

      In our thinking’s close and narrow lamp-lit house

      The vanity of our shut mortal mind

      Dreams that the chains of thought have made her ours;

      But only we play with our own brilliant bonds;

      Tying her down, it is ourselves we tie.

      In our hypnosis by one luminous point

      We see not what small figure of her we hold;

      We feel not her inspiring boundlessness,

      We share not her immortal liberty.

      Thus is it even with the seer and sage;

      For still the human limits the divine:

      Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight,

      Breathe her divine illimitable air,

      Her simple vast supremacy confess,

      Dare to surrender to her absolute.

      Then the Unmanifest reflects his form

      In the still mind as in a living glass;

      The timeless Ray descends into our hearts

      And we are rapt into eternity.

      For Truth is wider, greater than her forms.

      A thousand icons they have made of her

      And find her in the idols they adore;

      But she remains herself and infinite.

      End of Canto Eleven

      Canto Twelve

      The Heavens of the Ideal

      Always the Ideal beckoned from afar.

      Awakened by the touch of the Unseen,

      Deserting the boundary of things achieved,

      Aspired the strong discoverer, tireless Thought,

      Revealing at each step a luminous world.

      It left known summits for the unknown peaks:

      Impassioned, it sought the lone unrealised Truth,

      It longed for the Light that knows not death and birth.

      Each stage of the soul’s remote ascent was built

      Into a constant heaven felt always here.

      At each pace of the journey marvellous

      A new degree of wonder and of bliss,

      A new rung formed in Being’s mighty stair,

      A great wide step trembling with jewelled fire

      As if a burning spirit quivered there

      Upholding with his flame the immortal hope,

      As if a radiant God had given his soul

      That he might feel the tread of pilgrim feet

      Mounting in haste to the Eternal’s house.

      At either end of each effulgent stair

      The heavens of the ideal Mind were seen

      In a blue lucency of dreaming Space

      Like strips of brilliant sky clinging to the moon.

      On one side glimmered hue on floating hue,

      A glory of sunrise breaking on the soul,

      In a tremulous rapture of the heart’s insight

      And the spontaneous bliss that beauty gives,

      The lovely kingdoms of the deathless Rose.

      Above the spirit cased in mortal sense

      Are superconscious realms of heavenly peace,

      Below, the Inconscient’s sullen dim abyss,

      Between, behind our life, the deathless Rose.

      Across the covert air the spirit breathes,

      A body of the cosmic beauty and joy

      Unseen, unguessed by the blind suffering world,

      Climbing from Nature’s deep surrendered heart

      It blooms for ever at the feet of God,

      Fed by life’s sacrificial mysteries.

      Here too its bud is born in human breasts;

      Then by a touch, a presence or a voice

      The world is turned into a temple ground

      And all discloses the unknown Beloved.

      In an outburst of heavenly joy and ease

      Life yields to the divinity within

      And gives the rapture-offering of its all,

      And the soul opens to felicity.

      A bliss is felt that never can wholly cease,

      A sudden mystery of secret Grace

      Flowers goldening our earth of red desire.

      All the high gods who hid their visages

      From the soiled passionate ritual of our hopes,

      Reveal their names and their undying powers.

      A fiery stillness wakes the slumbering cells,

      A passion of the flesh becoming spirit,

      And marvellously is fulfilled at last

      The miracle for which our life was made.

      A flame in a white voiceless cupola

      Is seen and faces of immortal light,

      The radiant limbs that know not birth and death,

      The breasts that suckle the first-born of the Sun,

      The wings that crowd thought’s ardent silences,

      The eyes that look into spiritual Space.

      Our hidden centres of celestial force

      Open like flowers to a heavenly atmosphere;

      Mind