Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

eternal instant is the cause of the years.

      All he had done was to prepare a field;

      His small beginnings asked for a mighty end:

      For all that he had been must now new-shape

      In him her joy to embody, to enshrine

      Her beauty and greatness in his house of life.

      But now his being was too wide for self;

      His heart’s demand had grown immeasurable:

      His single freedom could not satisfy,

      Her light, her bliss he asked for earth and men.

      But vain are human power and human love

      To break earth’s seal of ignorance and death;

      His nature’s might seemed now an infant’s grasp;

      Heaven is too high for outstretched hands to seize.

      This Light comes not by struggle or by thought;

      In the mind’s silence the Transcendent acts

      And the hushed heart hears the unuttered Word.

      A vast surrender was his only strength.

      A Power that lives upon the heights must act,

      Bring into life’s closed room the Immortal’s air

      And fill the finite with the Infinite.

      All that denies must be torn out and slain

      And crushed the many longings for whose sake

      We lose the One for whom our lives were made.

      Now other claims had hushed in him their cry:

      Only he longed to draw her presence and power

      Into his heart and mind and breathing frame;

      Only he yearned to call for ever down

      Her healing touch of love and truth and joy

      Into the darkness of the suffering world.

      His soul was freed and given to her alone.

      End of Canto Two

      Canto Three

      The House of the Spirit and the New Creation

      A mightier task remained than all he had done.

      To That he turned from which all being comes,

      A sign attending from the Secrecy

      Which knows the Truth ungrasped behind our thoughts

      And guards the world with its all-seeing gaze.

      In the unapproachable stillness of his soul,

      Intense, one-pointed, monumental, lone,

      Patient he sat like an incarnate hope

      Motionless on a pedestal of prayer.

      A strength he sought that was not yet on earth,

      Help from a Power too great for mortal will,

      The light of a Truth now only seen afar,

      A sanction from his high omnipotent Source.

      But from the appalling heights there stooped no voice;

      The timeless lids were closed; no opening came.

      A neutral helpless void oppressed the years.

      In the texture of our bound humanity

      He felt the stark resistance huge and dumb

      Of our inconscient and unseeing base,

      The stubborn mute rejection in life’s depths,

      The ignorant No in the origin of things.

      A veiled collaboration with the Night

      Even in himself survived and hid from his view:

      Still something in his earthly being kept

      Its kinship with the Inconscient whence it came.

      A shadowy unity with a vanished past

      Treasured in an old-world frame was lurking there,

      Secret, unnoted by the illumined mind,

      And in subconscious whispers and in dream

      Still murmured at the mind’s and spirit’s choice.

      Its treacherous elements spread like slippery grains

      Hoping the incoming Truth might stumble and fall,

      And old ideal voices wandering moaned

      And pleaded for a heavenly leniency

      To the gracious imperfections of our earth

      And the sweet weaknesses of our mortal state.

      This now he willed to discover and exile,

      The element in him betraying God.

      All Nature’s recondite spaces were stripped bare,

      All her dim crypts and corners searched with fire

      Where refugee instincts and unshaped revolts

      Could shelter find in darkness’ sanctuary

      Against the white purity of heaven’s cleansing flame.

      All seemed to have perished that was undivine:

      Yet some minutest dissident might escape

      And still a centre lurk of the blind force.

      For the Inconscient too is infinite;

      The more its abysses we insist to sound,

      The more it stretches, stretches endlessly.

      Then lest a human cry should spoil the Truth

      He tore desire up from its bleeding roots

      And offered to the gods the vacant place.

      Thus could he bear the touch immaculate.

      A last and mightiest transformation came.

      His soul was all in front like a great sea

      Flooding the mind and body with its waves;

      His being, spread to embrace the universe,

      United the within and the without

      To make of life a cosmic harmony,

      An empire of the immanent Divine.

      In this tremendous universality

      Not only his soul-nature and mind-sense

      Included every soul and mind in his,

      But even the life of flesh and nerve was changed

      And grew one flesh and nerve with all that lives;

      He felt the joy of others as his joy,

      He bore the grief of others as his grief;

      His universal sympathy upbore,

      Immense like ocean, the creation’s load

      As earth upbears all beings’ sacrifice,

      Thrilled with the hidden Transcendent’s joy and peace.

      There was no more division’s endless scroll;

      One grew the Spirit’s secret unity,

      All Nature felt again the single bliss.

      There was no cleavage between soul and soul,

      There was no barrier between world and God.

      Overpowered