Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

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СКАЧАТЬ breath besieged

      Strove to rend life’s strong heart-cords and be free.

      Then helped, as if a beast had left its prey,

      A moment in a wave of rich relief

      Reborn to strength and happy ease he stood

      Rejoicing and resumed his confident toil

      But with less seeing strokes. Now the great woodsman

      Hewed at him and his labour ceased: lifting

      His arm he flung away the poignant axe

      Far from him like an instrument of pain.

      She came to him in silent anguish and clasped,

      And he cried to her, “Savitri, a pang

      Cleaves through my head and breast as if the axe

      Were piercing it and not the living branch.

      Such agony rends me as the tree must feel

      When it is sundered and must lose its life.

      Awhile let me lay my head upon thy lap

      And guard me with thy hands from evil fate:

      Perhaps because thou touchest, death may pass.”

      Then Savitri sat under branches wide,

      Cool, green against the sun, not the hurt tree

      Which his keen axe had cloven, – that she shunned;

      But leaned beneath a fortunate kingly trunk

      She guarded him in her bosom and strove to soothe

      His anguished brow and body with her hands.

      All grief and fear were dead within her now

      And a great calm had fallen. The wish to lessen

      His suffering, the impulse that opposes pain

      Were the one mortal feeling left. It passed:

      Griefless and strong she waited like the gods.

      But now his sweet familiar hue was changed

      Into a tarnished greyness and his eyes

      Dimmed over, forsaken of the clear light she loved.

      Only the dull and physical mind was left,

      Vacant of the bright spirit’s luminous gaze.

      But once before it faded wholly back,

      He cried out in a clinging last despair,

      “Savitri, Savitri, O Savitri,

      Lean down, my soul, and kiss me while I die.”

      And even as her pallid lips pressed his,

      His failed, losing last sweetness of response;

      His cheek pressed down her golden arm. She sought

      His mouth still with her living mouth, as if

      She could persuade his soul back with her kiss;

      Then grew aware they were no more alone.

      Something had come there conscious, vast and dire.

      Near her she felt a silent shade immense

      Chilling the noon with darkness for its back.

      An awful hush had fallen upon the place:

      There was no cry of birds, no voice of beasts.

      A terror and an anguish filled the world,

      As if annihilation’s mystery

      Had taken a sensible form. A cosmic mind

      Looked out on all from formidable eyes

      Contemning all with its unbearable gaze

      And with immortal lids and a vast brow

      It saw in its immense destroying thought

      All things and beings as a pitiful dream,

      Rejecting with calm disdain Nature’s delight,

      The wordless meaning of its deep regard

      Voicing the unreality of things

      And life that would be for ever but never was

      And its brief and vain recurrence without cease,

      As if from a Silence without form or name

      The Shadow of a remote uncaring god

      Doomed to his Nought the illusory universe,

      Cancelling its show of idea and act in Time

      And its imitation of eternity.

      She knew that visible Death was standing there

      And Satyavan had passed from her embrace.

      End of Book Eight, "Canto Three"

      End of Part Two

PART THREE

      BOOK NINE

The Book of Eternal Night

      Canto One

      Towards the Black Void

      So was she left alone in the huge wood,

      Surrounded by a dim unthinking world,

      Her husband’s corpse on her forsaken breast.

      In her vast silent spirit motionless

      She measured not her loss with helpless thoughts,

      Nor rent with tears the marble seals of pain:

      She rose not yet to face the dreadful god.

      Over the body she loved her soul leaned out

      In a great stillness without stir or voice,

      As if her mind had died with Satyavan.

      But still the human heart in her beat on.

      Aware still of his being near to hers,

      Closely she clasped to her СКАЧАТЬ