Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

shimmered stealing out into the Mind

      A mute and quivering ecstasy of light,

      A passion and delicacy of roseate fire.

      As one drawn to his lost spiritual home

      Feels now the closeness of a waiting love,

      Into a passage dim and tremulous

      That clasped him in from day and night’s pursuit,

      He travelled led by a mysterious sound.

      A murmur multitudinous and lone,

      All sounds it was in turn, yet still the same.

      A hidden call to unforeseen delight

      In the summoning voice of one long-known, well-loved,

      But nameless to the unremembering mind,

      It led to rapture back the truant heart.

      The immortal cry ravished the captive ear.

      Then, lowering its imperious mystery,

      It sank to a whisper circling round the soul.

      It seemed the yearning of a lonely flute

      That roamed along the shores of memory

      And filled the eyes with tears of longing joy.

      A cricket’s rash and fiery single note,

      It marked with shrill melody night’s moonless hush

      And beat upon a nerve of mystic sleep

      Its high insistent magical reveille.

      A jingling silver laugh of anklet bells

      Travelled the roads of a solitary heart;

      Its dance solaced an eternal loneliness:

      An old forgotten sweetness sobbing came.

      Or from a far harmonious distance heard

      The tinkling pace of a long caravan

      It seemed at times, or a vast forest’s hymn,

      The solemn reminder of a temple gong,

      A bee-croon honey-drunk in summer isles

      Ardent with ecstasy in a slumbrous noon,

      Or the far anthem of a pilgrim sea.

      An incense floated in the quivering air,

      A mystic happiness trembled in the breast

      As if the invisible Beloved had come

      Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face

      And close glad hands could seize his fugitive feet

      And the world change with the beauty of a smile.

      Into a wonderful bodiless realm he came,

      The home of a passion without name or voice,

      A depth he felt answering to every height,

      A nook was found that could embrace all worlds,

      A point that was the conscious knot of Space,

      An hour eternal in the heart of Time.

      The silent Soul of all the world was there:

      A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,

      A single Person who was himself and all

      And cherished Nature’s sweet and dangerous throbs

      Transfigured into beats divine and pure.

      One who could love without return for love,

      Meeting and turning to the best the worst,

      It healed the bitter cruelties of earth,

      Transforming all experience to delight;

      Intervening in the sorrowful paths of birth

      It rocked the cradle of the cosmic Child

      And stilled all weeping with its hand of joy;

      It led things evil towards their secret good,

      It turned racked falsehood into happy truth;

      Its power was to reveal divinity.

      Infinite, coeval with the mind of God,

      It bore within itself a seed, a flame,

      A seed from which the Eternal is new-born,

      A flame that cancels death in mortal things.

      All grew to all kindred and self and near;

      The intimacy of God was everywhere,

      No veil was felt, no brute barrier inert,

      Distance could not divide, Time could not change.

      A fire of passion burned in spirit-depths,

      A constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts,

      The throb of one adoration’s single bliss

      In a rapt ether of undying love.

      An inner happiness abode in all,

      A sense of universal harmonies,

      A measureless secure eternity

      Of truth and beauty and good and joy made one.

      Here was the welling core of finite life;

      A formless spirit became the soul of form.

      All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff;

      A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.

      All here was known by a spiritual sense:

      Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one

      Seized on all things by a moved identity,

      A sympathy of self with other selves,

      The touch of consciousness on consciousness

      And being’s look on being with inmost gaze

      And heart laid bare to heart without walls of speech

      And the unanimity of seeing minds

      In myriad forms luminous with the one God.

      Life was not there, but an impassioned force,

      Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps,

      Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,

      A quivering out from soul to answering soul,

      A mystic movement, a close influence,

      A free and happy and intense approach

      Of being to being with no screen or check,

      Without which life and love could never have been.

      Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,

      The soul itself was its own deathless form

      And met at once the touch of other souls

      Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true.

      As when one walks in sleep through luminous dreams

      And, conscious, knows the truth their figures mean,

      Here where reality was its own dream,

      He knew things by their soul and not their shape:

      As those who have lived long made one in love

      Need word nor sign for heart’s reply to heart,

      He met and communed without bar of speech

      With beings unveiled by a material frame.

      There was a strange spiritual scenery,