Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

loveliness of lakes and streams and hills,

      A flow, a fixity in a soul-space,

      And plains and valleys, stretches of soul-joy,

      And gardens that were flower-tracts of the spirit,

      Its meditations of tinged reverie.

      Air was the breath of a pure infinite.

      A fragrance wandered in a coloured haze

      As if the scent and hue of all sweet flowers

      Had mingled to copy heaven’s atmosphere.

      Appealing to the soul and not the eye

      Beauty lived there at home in her own house,

      There all was beautiful by its own right

      And needed not the splendour of a robe.

      All objects were like bodies of the Gods,

      A spirit symbol environing a soul,

      For world and self were one reality.

      Immersed in voiceless internatal trance

      The beings that once wore forms on earth sat there

      In shining chambers of spiritual sleep.

      Passed were the pillar-posts of birth and death,

      Passed was their little scene of symbol deeds,

      Passed were the heavens and hells of their long road;

      They had returned into the world’s deep soul.

      All now was gathered into pregnant rest:

      Person and nature suffered a slumber change.

      In trance they gathered back their bygone selves,

      In a background memory’s foreseeing muse

      Prophetic of new personality

      Arranged the map of their coming destiny’s course:

      Heirs of their past, their future’s discoverers,

      Electors of their own self-chosen lot,

      They waited for the adventure of new life.

      A Person persistent through the lapse of worlds,

      Although the same for ever in many shapes

      By the outward mind unrecognisable,

      Assuming names unknown in unknown climes

      Imprints through Time upon the earth’s worn page

      A growing figure of its secret self,

      And learns by experience what the spirit knew,

      Till it can see its truth alive and God.

      Once more they must face the problem-game of birth,

      The soul’s experiment of joy and grief

      And thought and impulse lighting the blind act,

      And venture on the roads of circumstance,

      Through inner movements and external scenes

      Travelling to self across the forms of things.

      Into creation’s centre he had come.

      The spirit wandering from state to state

      Finds here the silence of its starting-point

      In the formless force and the still fixity

      And brooding passion of the world of Soul.

      All that is made and once again unmade,

      The calm persistent vision of the One

      Inevitably re-makes, it lives anew:

      Forces and lives and beings and ideas

      Are taken into the stillness for a while;

      There they remould their purpose and their drift,

      Recast their nature and re-form their shape.

      Ever they change and changing ever grow,

      And passing through a fruitful stage of death

      And after long reconstituting sleep

      Resume their place in the process of the Gods

      Until their work in cosmic Time is done.

      Here was the fashioning chamber of the worlds.

      An interval was left twixt act and act,

      Twixt birth and birth, twixt dream and waking dream,

      A pause that gave new strength to do and be.

      Beyond were regions of delight and peace,

      Mute birthplaces of light and hope and love,

      And cradles of heavenly rapture and repose.

      In a slumber of the voices of the world

      He of the eternal moment grew aware;

      His knowledge stripped bare of the garbs of sense

      Knew by identity without thought or word;

      His being saw itself without its veils,

      Life’s line fell from the spirit’s infinity.

      Along a road of pure interior light,

      Alone between tremendous Presences,

      Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods,

      His soul passed on, a single conscious power,

      Towards the end which ever begins again,

      Approaching through a stillness dumb and calm

      To the source of all things human and divine.

      There he beheld in their mighty union’s poise

      The figure of the deathless Two-in-One,

      A single being in two bodies clasped,

      A diarchy of two united souls,

      Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;

      Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.

      Behind them in a morning dusk One stood

      Who brought them forth from the Unknowable.

      Ever disguised she awaits the seeking spirit;

      Watcher on the supreme unreachable peaks,

      Guide of the traveller of the unseen paths,

      She guards the austere approach to the Alone.

      At the beginning of each far-spread plane

      Pervading with her power the cosmic suns

      She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works

      And thinker of the symbol of its scene.

      Above them all she stands supporting all,

      The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled

      Of whom the world is the inscrutable mask;

      The ages are the footfalls of her tread,

      Their happenings the figure of her thoughts,

      And all creation is her endless act.

      His spirit was made a vessel of her force;

      Mute in the fathomless passion of his will

      He outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer.

      Then in a sovereign answer to his heart

      A gesture came as of worlds thrown away,

      And from her raiment’s lustrous mystery raised

      One