Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

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      Canto Five

      The Godheads of the Little Life

      A fixed and narrow power with rigid forms,

      He saw the empire of the little life,

      An unhappy corner in eternity.

      It lived upon the margin of the Idea

      Protected by Ignorance as in a shell.

      Then, hoping to learn the secret of this world

      He peered across its scanty fringe of sight,

      To disengage from its surface-clear obscurity

      The Force that moved it and the Idea that made,

      Imposing smallness on the Infinite,

      The ruling spirit of its littleness,

      The divine law that gave it right to be,

      Its claim on Nature and its need in Time.

      He plunged his gaze into the siege of mist

      That held this ill-lit straitened continent

      Ringed with the skies and seas of ignorance

      And kept it safe from Truth and Self and Light.

      As when a searchlight stabs the Night’s blind breast

      And dwellings and trees and figures of men appear

      As if revealed to an eye in Nothingness,

      All lurking things were torn out of their veils

      And held up in his vision’s sun-white blaze.

      A busy restless uncouth populace

      Teemed in their dusky unnoted thousands there.

      In a mist of secrecy wrapping the world-scene

      The little deities of Time’s nether act

      Who work remote from Heaven’s controlling eye,

      Plotted, unknown to the creatures whom they move,

      The small conspiracies of this petty reign

      Amused with the small contrivings, the brief hopes

      And little eager steps and little ways

      And reptile wallowings in the dark and dust,

      And the crouch and ignominy of creeping life.

      A trepidant and motley multitude,

      A strange pell-mell of magic artisans,

      Was seen moulding the plastic clay of life,

      An elfin brood, an elemental kind.

      Astonished by the unaccustomed glow,

      As if immanent in the shadows started up

      Imps with wry limbs and carved beast visages,

      Sprite-prompters goblin-wizened or faery-small,

      And genii fairer but unsouled and poor

      And fallen beings, their heavenly portion lost,

      And errant divinities trapped in Time’s dust.

      Ignorant and dangerous wills but armed with power,

      Half-animal, half-god their mood, their shape.

      Out of the greyness of a dim background

      Their whispers come, an inarticulate force,

      Awake in mind an echoing thought or word,

      To their sting of impulse the heart’s sanction draw,

      And in that little Nature do their work

      And fill its powers and creatures with unease.

      Its seed of joy they curse with sorrow’s fruit,

      Put out with error’s breath its scanty lights

      And turn its surface truths to falsehood’s ends,

      Its small emotions spur, its passions drive

      To the abyss or through the bog and mire:

      Or else with a goad of hard dry lusts they prick,

      While jogs on devious ways that nowhere lead

      Life’s cart finding no issue from ignorance.

      To sport with good and evil is their law;

      Luring to failure and meaningless success,

      All models they corrupt, all measures cheat,

      Make knowledge a poison, virtue a pattern dull

      And lead the endless cycles of desire

      Through semblances of sad or happy chance

      To an inescapable fatality.

      All by their influence is enacted there.

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