not even the boy with the brown squinting eyes:
I’ll still remain. For one can always watch.
Am I not right? You, to whom life would taste
so bitter, Father, when you tasted mine,
that turbid first infusion of my Must,
you kept on tasting as I kept on growing,
and, still arrested by the after-taste
of such queer future, tried my clouded gaze—
you, who so often, since you died, my Father,
have been afraid within my inmost hope,
surrendering realms of that serenity
the dead are lords of for my bit of fate—
am I not right? And you, am I not right—
you that would love me for that small beginning
of love for you I always turned away from,
because the space within your faces changed,
even while I loved it, into cosmic space
where you no longer were … when I feel like it,
to wait before the puppet stage—no, rather
gaze so intensely on it that at last
a counterpoising angel has to come
and play a part there, snatching up the husks?
Angel and doll! Then there’s at last a play.
Then there unites what we continually
part by our mere existence. Then at last
emerges from our seasons here the cycle
of the whole process. Over and above us,
then, there’s the angel playing. Look, the dying—
surely they must suspect how full of pretext
is all that we accomplish here, where nothing
is what it really is. O hours of childhood,
hours when behind the figures there was more
than the mere past, and when what lay before us
was not the future! True, we were growing, and sometimes
made haste to be grown up, half for the sake
of those who’d nothing left but their grown-upness.
Yet, when alone, we entertained ourselves
with everlastingness: there we would stand,
within the gap left between world and toy,
upon a spot which, from the first beginning,
had been established for a pure event.
Who’ll show a child just as it is? Who’ll place it
within its constellation, with the measure
of distance in its hand? Who’ll make its death
from gray bread, that grows hard—or leave it there,
within the round mouth, like the seeded core
of a nice apple?…Minds of murderers
can easily be fathomed. This, though: death,
the whole of death, before life’s start, to hold it
so gently and so free from all resentment,
transcends description.
THE EIGHTH ELEGY
Dedicated to Rudolf Kassner
With all its eyes the creature-world beholds
the open. But our eyes, as though reversed,
encircle it on every side, like traps
set round its unobstructed path to freedom.
What is outside, we know from the brute’s face
alone; for while a child’s quite small we take it
and turn it round and force it to look backwards
at conformation, not that openness
so deep within the brute’s face. Free from death.
We alone see that; the free animal
has its decease perpetually behind it
and God in front, and when it moves, it moves
within eternity, like running springs.
We’ve never, no, not for a single day,
pure space before us, such as that which flowers
endlessly open into: always world,
and never nowhere without no: that pure,
unsuperintended element one breathes,
endlessly knows, and never craves. A child
sometimes gets quietly lost there, to be always
jogged back again. Or someone dies and is it.
For, nearing death, one perceives death no longer,
and stares ahead—perhaps with large brute gaze.
Lovers—were not the other present, always
blocking the view!—draw near to it and wonder …
Behind the other, as though through oversight,
the thing’s revealed … But no one gets beyond
the other, and so world returns once more.
Always facing Creation, we perceive there
only a mirroring of the free and open,
dimmed by our breath. Or that a dumb brute’s calmly
raising its head to look us through and through.
For this is Destiny: being opposite,
and nothing else, and always opposite.
Did consciousness such as we have exist
in the sure animal that moves towards us
upon a different course, the brute would drag us
round in its wake. But its own being for it
is infinite, inapprehensible,
unintrospective, pure, like its outgazing.
Where we see Future, it sees Everything,
itself in Everything, for ever healed.
And yet, within the wakefully-warm beast
there lies the weight and care of a great sadness.
For that which often overwhelms us clings
to him as well—a kind of memory
that what one’s pressing after now was once
nearer and truer and attached to us
with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance,
there it was breath. Compared with that first home
the second seems ambiguous and fickle.
Oh, bliss of tiny creatures that remain
for ever in the womb that brought them forth!
Joy of the gnat, that can still leap within,
even on its wedding-day: for womb is all!
Look at the half-assurance of the bird,
through origin almost aware of both,
like one of those Etruscan souls, escaped
from a dead man enclosed within a space
on which his resting figure forms a lid.
And how dismayed is any womb-born thing
that has to fly! As though it were afraid
of its own self, it zigzags through the air
like crack through cup. The way a bat’s track runs
rendingly through the evening’s porcelain.
And we, spectators always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses.
We re-arrange it, and collapse ourselves.
Who’s turned us round like this, so that we always,
do what we may, retain the attitude
of someone who’s departing? Just as he,
on the last hill, that shows him all his valley
for the last time, will turn and stop and linger,
we live our lives, for ever taking leave.
THE NINTH ELEGY
Why, when this span of life might be fleeted away
as laurel, a little darker than all
the surrounding green, with tiny waves on the border
of every leaf (like the smile of a wind)—oh, why
have to be human, and, shunning Destiny,
long for Destiny? …
Not because happiness really
exists, that precipitate profit of imminent loss.
Not out of curiosity, not just to practice the heart,
that could still be there in laurel…
But because being here is much, and because all this
that’s here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely
concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once,
everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too,
once. And never again. But this
having been once, though only once,
having been once on earth—can it ever be cancelled?
And so we keep pressing on and trying to perform it,
trying to contain it within our simple hands,
in the more and more crowded gaze, in the speechless heart.
Trying to become it. To give it to whom? We’d rather
hold on to it all for ever … But into the other relation,
what, alas! do we carry across? Not the beholding we’ve here
slowly acquired, and no here occurrence. Not one.
Sufferings, then. Above all, the hardness of life,
the long experience of love; in fact,
purely untellable things. But later,
under the stars, what use? the more deeply untellable stars?
Yet the wanderer too doesn’t bring from mountain to valley
a handful of earth, of for all untellable earth, but only
a word he has won, pure, the yellow and blue
gentian. Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window,—
possibly: Pillar, Tower? … but for saying, remember,
oh, for such saying as never the things themselves
hoped so intensely to be. Is not the secret purpose
of this sly Earth, in urging a pair of lovers,
just to make everything leap with ecstasy in them?
Threshold: what does it mean
to a pair of lovers, that they should be wearing their own
worn threshold a little, they too, after the many before,
before the many to come … as a matter of course!
Here is the time for the Tellable, here is its home.
Speak and proclaim. More than ever
things we can live with are falling away, for that
which is oustingly taking their place is an imageless act.
Act under crusts, that will readily split as soon
as the doing within outgrows them and takes a new outline.
Between the hammers lives on
our heart, as between the teeth
the tongue, which, in spite of all,
still continues to praise.
Praise this world to the Angel, not the untellable: you
can’t impress him with the splendor you’ve felt; in the cosmos
where he more feelingly feels you’re only a novice. So show him
some simple thing, refashioned by age after age,
till it lives in our hands and eyes as a part of ourselves.
Tell him things. He’ll stand more astonished: as you did
beside the roper in Rome or the potter in Egypt.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how guileless and ours;
how even the moaning of grief purely determines on form,
serves as a thing, or dies into a thing—to escape
to a bliss beyond the fiddle. These things that live on departure
understand when you praise them: fleeting, they look for
rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all.
Want us to change them entirely, within our invisible hearts,
into—oh, endlessly—into ourselves! Whosoever we are.
Earth, is it not just this that you want: to arise
invisibly in us? Is not your dream
to be one day invisible? Earth! invisible!
What is your urgent command, if not transformation?
Earth, you darling, I will! Oh, believe me, you need
no more of your spring-times to win me over: a single one,
ah, one, is already more than my blood can endure.
Beyond all names I am yours, and have been for ages.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is Death, that friendly Death.
Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
are growing less…Supernumerous existence
wells up in my heart.
SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
(1923)
A GOD CAN DO IT
A god can do it. But can a man expect
to penetrate the narrow lyre and follow?
His sense is discord. Temples for Apollo
are not found where two heart-ways intersect.
For song, as taught by you, is not desire,
not wooing of something finally attained;
song is existence. For the god unstrained.
But when shall we exist? And he require
the earth and heavens to exist for us?
It’s more than being in love, boy, though your ringing
voice may have flung your dumb mouth open thus:
learn to forget those fleeting ecstasies.
Far other is the breath of real singing.
An aimless breath. A stirring in the God. A breeze.
RAISE NO COMMEMORATING STONE
Raise no commemorating stone. The roses
shall blossom every summer for his sake.
For this is Orpheus. His metamorphosis
in this one and in that. We should not make
searches for other names. Once and for all,
it’s Orpheus when there’s song. He comes and goes.
Is it not much if sometimes, by some small
number of days, he shall outlive the rose?
Could you but feel his passing’s needfulness!
Though he himself may dread the hour drawing nigher
Already, when his words pass earthliness,
he passes with them far beyond your gaze.
His hands unhindered by the trellised lyre,
in all his over-steppings he obeys.
PRAISING, THAT’S IT!
Praising, that’s it! As a praiser and blesser
he came like the ore from the taciturn mine.
Came with his heart, oh, transient presser,
for men, of a never-exhaustible wine.
Voice never fails him for things lacking luster,
sacred example will open his mouth.
All becomes vineyard, all becomes cluster,
warmed by his sympathy’s ripening south.
Crypts and the moldering kings who lie there
do not belie his praising, neither
doubt, when a shadow obscures our days.
He is a messenger always attendant,
reaching far through their gates resplendent
dishes of fruit for the dead to praise.
MIRRORS
Mirrors: no one has yet distilled with
patient knowledge your fugitive
essence. You spaces in time, that are filled with
holes like those of a sieve.
Squandering the empty ball-room’s pomp,
deep as forests when twilight broods …
And, like sixteen-pointers, the lusters romp
through your virginal solitudes.
Pictures crowd you at times. A few
seem to be taken right within you,
shyly to others you wave adieu.
There, though, the fairest will always be,
till through to her lips withheld continue
Narcissus, released into lucency.
THIS IS THE CREATURE
This is the creature there has never been.
They never knew it, and yet, none the less,
they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,
its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.
Not there, because they loved it, it behaved
as though it were. They always left some space.
And in that clear unpeopled space they saved
it lightly reared its head, with scarce a trace
of not being there. They fed it, not with corn,
but only with the possibility
of being. And that was able to confer
such strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.
Whitely it stole up to a maid—to be
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within the silver mirror and in her.
O FOUNTAIN MOUTH
O fountain mouth, you mouth that can respond
so inexhaustibly to all who ask
with one, pure, single saying. Marble mask
before the water’s flowing face. Beyond,
the aqueducts’ long derivation. Past
the tombs, from where the Apennines begin,
they bring your saying to you, which at last,
over the grizzled age of your dark chin,
falls to the waiting basin, crystal-clear;
falls to the slumbering recumbent ear,
the marble ear, with which you will confer.
One of earth’s ears. With her own lonely mood
she thus converses. Let a jug intrude,
she’ll only think you’ve interrupted her.
STILL THE GOD REMAINS
Still the god remains an ever-growing
wholeness we have irritably burst.
We are sharp, for we insist on knowing,
he exists serenely and dispersed.
Even gifts of purest consecration
only find acceptance in so much
as he turns in moveless contemplation
to the end we do not touch.
Only those who dwell
out of sight can taste the spring we hear,
when the god has silently assented.
With its brawling we must be contented.
And the lamb’s more silent instinct’s clear
when it begs us for its bell.
DANCER
Dancer: you transmutation
of all going-by into going: what you have wrought!
And your finishing whirl, that tree of mere animation,
how it took over the year you had flyingly caught!
Did not its crown, that your swaying might settle to swarming,
suddenly blossom with stillness? Above that, too,
was there not sunnily, was there not summerly warming
all the warmth that exhaled from you?
Nay, it was able, your tree of rapture, to bear.
Are they not, all its fruits that so peacefully shine,
jug streaked with ripeness, vase further ripened, still there?
And does not your mark in their paintings still meet the discerning—
that of your eyebrows’ darker line
swiftly inscribed on the wall of your own swift turning?
HOW IT THRILLS US
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