Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

      It bore the stroke of That which kills and saves.

      Across the awful march no eye can see,

      Barring its dreadful route no will can change,

      She faced the engines of the universe;

      A heart stood in the way of the driving wheels:

      Its giant workings paused in front of a mind,

      Its stark conventions met the flame of a soul.

      A magic leverage suddenly is caught

      That moves the veiled Ineffable’s timeless will:

      A prayer, a master act, a king idea

      Can link man’s strength to a transcendent Force.

      Then miracle is made the common rule,

      One mighty deed can change the course of things;

      A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.

      All now seems Nature’s massed machinery;

      An endless servitude to material rule

      And long determination’s rigid chain,

      Her firm and changeless habits aping Law,

      Her empire of unconscious deft device

      Annul the claim of man’s free human will.

      He too is a machine amid machines;

      A piston brain pumps out the shapes of thought,

      A beating heart cuts out emotion’s modes;

      An insentient energy fabricates a soul.

      Or the figure of the world reveals the signs

      Of a tied Chance repeating her old steps

      In circles around Matter’s binding-posts.

      A random series of inept events

      To which reason lends illusive sense, is here,

      Or the empiric Life’s instinctive search,

      Or a vast ignorant mind’s colossal work.

      But wisdom comes, and vision grows within:

      Then Nature’s instrument crowns himself her king;

      He feels his witnessing self and conscious power;

      His soul steps back and sees the Light supreme.

      A Godhead stands behind the brute machine.

      This truth broke in in a triumph of fire;

      A victory was won for God in man,

      The deity revealed its hidden face.

      The great World-Mother now in her arose:

      A living choice reversed fate’s cold dead turn,

      Affirmed the spirit’s tread on Circumstance,

      Pressed back the senseless dire revolving Wheel

      And stopped the mute march of Necessity.

      A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks

      Empowered to force the door denied and closed

      Smote from Death’s visage its dumb absolute

      And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.

      End of Canto Two

      Canto Three

      The Yoga of the King:

       The Yoga of the Soul’s Release

      A world’s desire compelled her mortal birth.

      One in the front of the immemorial quest,

      Protagonist of the mysterious play

      In which the Unknown pursues himself through forms

      And limits his eternity by the hours

      And the blind Void struggles to live and see,

      A thinker and toiler in the ideal’s air,

      Brought down to earth’s dumb need her radiant power.

      His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres

      Into our province of ephemeral sight,

      A colonist from immortality.

      A pointing beam on earth’s uncertain roads,

      His birth held up a symbol and a sign;

      His human self like a translucent cloak

      Covered the All-Wise who leads the unseeing world.

      Affiliated to cosmic Space and Time

      And paying here God’s debt to earth and man

      A greater sonship was his divine right.

      Although consenting to mortal ignorance,

      His knowledge shared the Light ineffable.

      A strength of the original Permanence

      Entangled in the moment and its flow,

      He kept the vision of the Vasts behind:

      A power was in him from the Unknowable.

      An archivist of the symbols of the Beyond,

      A treasurer of superhuman dreams,

      He bore the stamp of mighty memories

      And shed their grandiose ray on human life.

      His days were a long growth to the Supreme.

      A skyward being nourishing its roots

      On sustenance from occult spiritual founts

      Climbed through white rays to meet an unseen Sun.

      His soul lived as eternity’s delegate,

      His mind was like a fire assailing heaven,

      His will a hunter in the trails of light.

      An ocean impulse lifted every breath;

      Each action left the footprints of a god,

      Each moment was a beat of puissant wings.

      The little plot of our mortality

      Touched by this tenant from the heights became

      A playground of the living Infinite.

      This bodily appearance is not all;

      The form deceives, the person is a mask;

      Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.

      His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years

      An incognito of the Imperishable.

      A spirit that is a flame of God abides,

      A fiery portion of the Wonderful,

      Artist of his own beauty and delight,

      Immortal in our mortal poverty.

      This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite,

      This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,

      Initiate of his own veiled mysteries,

      Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought.

      In the mute strength of the occult Idea

      Determining predestined shape and act,

      Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale,

      Changing his imaged self from form to form,

      He regards the icon growing by his gaze

      And in the worm foresees the coming god.

      At