and counterpoise their heaviness with colors.
And women too appeared to you as fruits,
and children too, both of them from within
impelled into the forms of their existence.
And finally you saw yourself as fruit,
lifted yourself out of your clothes and carried
that self before the mirror, let it in
up to your gaze; which remained, large, in front,
and did not say: that’s me; no, but: this is.
So uninquiring was your gaze at last,
so unpossessive and so truly poor,
it wanted even you no longer: holy.
That’s how I would retain you, as you placed
yourself within the mirror, deep within,
and far from all else. Why come differently?
Why thus revoke yourself? Why are you trying
to make me feel that in those amber beads
around your neck there was still something heavy
with such a heaviness as never lurks
in the beyond of tranquil pictures? Why
does something in your bearing bode misfortune
What makes you read the contours of your body
like lines upon a hand, and me no longer
able to see them but as destiny?
Come to the candle-light. I’m not afraid
to look upon the dead. When they return
they have a right to hospitality
within our gaze, the same as other things.
Come; we’ll remain a little while in silence.
Look at this rose, here on my writing-desk:
is not the light around it just as timid
as that round you? It too should not be here.
It ought to have remained or passed away
out in the garden there, unmixed with me—
it stays, unconscious of my consciousness.
Don’t be afraid now if I comprehend:
it’s rising in me—oh, I must, I must,
even if it kills me, I must comprehend.
Comprehend, that you’re here. I comprehend.
Just as a blind man comprehends a thing,
I feel your fate although I cannot name it.
Let both of us lament that someone took you
out of your mirror. If you still can cry?
No, you can’t cry. You long ago transformed
the force and thrust of tears to your ripe gazing,
and were in act of changing every kind
of sap within you to a strong existence
that mounts and circles in blind equipoise.
Then, for the last time, chance got hold of you,
and snatched you back out of your farthest progress,
back to a world where saps will have their way.
Did not snatch all, only a piece at first,
but when reality, from day to day,
so swelled around that piece that it grew heavy,
you needed your whole self; then off you went
and broke yourself in fragments from your law,
laboriously, needing yourself. And then
you took yourself away and from your heart’s
warm, night-warm, soil you dug the yet green seeds
your death was going to spring from: your own death,
the death appropriate to your own life.
And then you ate those grains of your own death
like any others, ate them one by one,
and had within yourself an after-taste
of unexpected sweetness, had sweet lips,
you: in your senses sweet within already.
Let us lament. Do you know how unwilling
and hesitatingly your blood returned,
recalled from an incomparable orbit?
With what confusion it took up again
the tiny circulation of the body?
With what mistrust it entered the placenta,
suddenly tired from the long homeward journey?
You drove it on again, you pushed it forward,
you dragged it to the hearth, as people drag
a herd of animals to sacrifice;
and spite of all desired it to be happy.
And finally you forced it: it was happy,
and ran up and surrendered. You supposed,
being so accustomed to the other measures,
that this was only for a little while;
but now you were in time, and time is long.
And time goes by, and time goes on, and time
is like relapsing after some long illness.
How very short your life, when you compare it
with hours you used to sit in silence, bending
the boundless forces of your boundless future
out of their course to the new germination,
that became fate once more. O painful labor.
Labor beyond all strength. And you performed it
day after day, you dragged yourself along to it
and pulled the lovely woof out of the loom
and wove your threads into another pattern.
And still had spirit for a festival.
For when you’d done you looked for some reward,
like children, when they’ve drunk a nasty drink
of bitter-sweet tea that may make one better.
You gave your own reward, being still so distant,
even then, from all the rest; and no one there
who could have hit on a reward to please you.
You yourself knew it. You sat up in child-bed,
a mirror there before you, that returned
all that you gave. Now everything was you,
and right in front; within was mere deceit,
the sweet deceit of Everywoman, gladly
putting her jewels on and doing her hair.
And so you died like women long ago,
died in the old warm house, old-fashionedly,
the death of those in child-bed, who are trying
to close themselves again but cannot do it,
because that darkness which they also bore
returns and grows importunate and enters.
Ought they not, though, to have gone and hunted up
some mourners for you? Women who will weep
for money, and, if paid sufficiently,
will howl through a whole night when all is still.
Observances! We haven’t got enough
observances. All vanishes in talk.
That’s why you have to come back, and with me
retrieve omitted mourning. Can you hear me?
I’d like to fling my voice out like a cloth
over the broken fragments of your death
and tug at it till it was all in tatters,
and everything I said was forced to go
clad in the rags of that torn voice and freeze—
if mourning were enough. But I accuse:
not him who thus withdrew you from yourself
(I can’t distinguish him, he’s like them all),
but in him I accuse all: accuse man.
If somewhere deep within me rises up
a having-once-been-child I don’t yet know,
perhaps the purest childness of my childhood:
I will not know it. Without looking at it
or asking, I will make an angel of it,
and hurl that angel to the foremost rank
of crying angels that remembrance God.
For now too long this suffering has lasted,
and none can stand it; it’s too hard for us,
this tortuous suffering caused by spurious love,
which, building on prescription like a habit,
calls itself just and battens on injustice.
Where is the man who justly may possess?
Who can possess what cannot hold itself
but only now and then blissfully catches
and flings itself on lik
e a child a ball?
As little as the admiral can retain
the Nikê poised upon his vessel’s prow
when the mysterious lightness of her godhead
has caught her up into the limpid sea-wind,
can one of us call back to him the woman
who, seeing us no longer, takes her way
along some narrow strip of her existence,
as through a miracle, without mischance—
unless his calling and delight were guilt.
For this is guilt, if anything be guilt,
not to enlarge the freedom of a love
with all the freedom in one’s own possession.
All we can offer where we love is this:
to loose each other; for to hold each other
comes easy to us and requires no learning.
Are you still there? Still hiding in some corner?—
You knew so much of all that I’ve been saying,
and could so much too, for you passed through life
open to all things, like a breaking day.
Women suffer: loving means being lonely,
and artists feel at times within their work
the need, where most they love, for transmutation.
You began both; and both exist in that
which fame, detaching it from you, disfigures.
Oh, you were far beyond all fame. Were in-
conspicuous; had gently taken in
your beauty as a gala flag’s intaken
on the gray morning of a working-day,
and wanted nothing but a lengthy work—
which is not done; in spite of all, not done.
If you’re still there, if somewhere in this darkness
there’s still a spot where your perceptive spirit’s
vibrating on the shallow waves of sound
a lonely voice within a lonely night
starts in the air-stream of a lofty room:
hear me and help me. Look, without knowing when,
we keep on slipping backwards from our progress
into some unintended thing, and there
we get ourselves involved as in a dream,
and there at last we die without awakening.
No one’s got further. Anyone who’s lifted
the level of his blood to some long work
may find he’s holding it aloft no longer
and that it’s worthlessly obeying its weight.
For somewhere there’s an old hostility
between our human life and greatest work.
May I see into it and it say: help me!
Do not return. If you can bear it, stay
dead with the dead. The dead are occupied.
But help me, as you may without distraction,
as the most distant sometimes helps: in me.
DUINO ELEGIES
(1923)
THE FIRST ELEGY
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his
stronger existence. For Beauty’s nothing
but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because it serenely
disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
And so I repress myself, and swallow the call-note
of depth-dark sobbing. Alas, who is there
we can make use of? Not angels, not men;
and even the noticing beasts are aware
that we don’t feel very securely at home
in this interpreted world. There remains, perhaps,
some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day,
there remains for us yesterday’s walk and the long-drawn loyalty
of a habit that liked us and stayed and never gave notice.
Oh, and there’s Night, there’s Night, when wind full of cosmic space
feeds on our faces: for whom would she not remain,
longed for, mild disenchantress, painfully there
for the lonely heart to achieve? Is she lighter for lovers?
Alas, with each other they only conceal their lot!
Don’t you know yet?—Fling the emptiness out of your arms
to broaden the spaces we breathe—maybe that the birds
will feel the extended air in more fervent flight.
Yes, the Springs had need of you. Many a star
was waiting for you to perceive it. Many a wave
would rise in the past towards you; or else, perhaps,
as you went by an open window, a violin
would be utterly giving itself. All this was commission.
But were you equal to it? Were you not still
distraught by expectancy, as though all were announcing
some beloved’s approach? (As if you could hope
to house her, with all those great strange thoughts
going in and out and often staying overnight!)
Should you be longing, though, sing the great lovers: the fame
of all they can feel is far from immortal enough.
Those—you envied them almost, those forsaken, you found
so far beyond the requited in loving. Begin
ever anew their never-attainable praise.
Consider: the Hero continues, even his setting
was a pretext for further existence, an ultimate birth.
But lovers are taken back by exhausted Nature
into herself, as though such creative force
could not be exerted twice. Does Gaspara Stampa
mean enough to you yet, and that any girl, whose beloved
has slipped away, might feel, from that far intenser
example of loving: “Could I but become like her!”?
Should not these oldest sufferings be finally growing
fruitfuller for us? Is it not time that, in loving,
we freed ourselves from the loved one, and, quivering, endured:
as the arrow endures the string, to become, in the gathering out-leap,
something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.
Voices, voices. Hearken, my heart, as only
saints once hearkened: so, that the giant call
lifted them off the ground; they, though, impossibles,
went on kneeling and paid no heed:
such was their hearkening. Not that you could bear God’s
voice, by a long way. But hark to the suspiration,
the uninterrupted news that grows out of silence.
Rustling towards you now from those youthfully-dead.
Whenever you entered a church in Rome or in Naples
were you not always being quietly addressed by their fate?
Or else an inscription sublimely imposed itself on you,
as, lately, the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.
What they require of me? that I should gently remove
the appearance of suffered injustice, that hinders
a little, at times, their purely-proceeding spirits.
True, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to use no longer customs scarcely acquired,
not to interpret roses, and other things
that promise so much, in terms of a human future;
to be no longer all that one used to be
in endlessly anxious hands, and to lay aside
even one’s proper name like a broken toy.
Strange, not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange,
to see all that was once relation so loosely fluttering
hither and thither in space. And it’s hard, being dead,
and full of retrieving before one begins to perceive
a little eternity.—All of the living, though,
make the mistake of drawing too sharp distinctions.
Angels (it’s said) would be often unable to tell
whe
ther they moved among living or dead. The eternal
torrent whirls all the ages through either realm
for ever, and sounds above their voices in both.
They’ve finally no more need of us, the early-departed,
one’s gently weaned from terrestrial things as one mildly
outgrows the breasts of a mother. But we, that have need of
such mighty secrets, we, for whom sorrow’s so often
source of blessedest progress, could we exist without them?
Is the story in vain, how once, in the mourning for Linos,
venturing earliest music pierced barren numbness, and how,
in the startled space an almost deified youth
suddenly quitted for ever, emptiness first
felt the vibration that now lifts us and comforts and helps?
THE FOURTH ELEGY
O trees of life, what are your signs of winter?
We’re not at one. We’ve no instinctive knowledge,
like migratory birds. Outstript and late,
we force ourselves on winds and find no welcome
from ponds where we alight. We comprehend
flowering and fading simultaneously.
And somewhere lions still roam, all unaware,
while yet their splendor lasts, of any weakness.
We, though, while we’re intent upon one thing,
can feel the cost and conquest of another.
The Next’s our enemy. Aren’t lovers always
coming to precipices in each other—
lovers, that looked for spaces, hunting, home?
Then, for the sudden sketchwork of a moment,
a ground of contrast’s painfully prepared,
to make us see it. For they’re very clear
with us, we that don’t know our feeling’s shape,
but only that which forms it from outside.
Who’s not sat tense before his own heart’s curtain?
Up it would go: the scenery was Parting.
Easy to understand. The well-known garden,
swaying a little. Then appeared the dancer.
Not him! Enough! However light he foots it,
he’s just disguised, and turns into a bourgeois,
and passes through the kitchen to his dwelling.
I will not have these half-filled masks! No, no,
rather the doll. That’s full. I’ll force myself
to bear the husk, the wire, and even that face
of sheer appearance. Here! I’m in my seat.
Even if the lights go out, even if I’m told
“There’s nothing more”—even if grayish drafts
of emptiness come drifting from the stage—
even if of all my silent forbears none
sits by me any longer, not a woman,
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