I
A tree ascending there. O pure transcension!
O Orpheus sings! O tall tree in the ear!
All noise suspended, yet in that suspension
what new beginning, beckoning, change, appear!
Creatures of silence pressing through the clear
disintricated wood from lair and nest;
and neither cunning, it grew manifest,
had made them breathe so quietly, nor fear,
but only hearing. Roar, cry, bell they found
within their hearts too small. And where before
less than a hut had harboured what came thronging,
a refuge tunnelled out of dimmest longing
with lowly entrance through a quivering door,
you built them temples in their sense of sound.
II
And almost maiden-like was what drew near
from that twin-happiness of song and lyre,
and shone so clearly through her spring attire,
and made herself a bed within my ear.
And slept in me sleep that was everything:
the trees I'd always loved, the unrevealed,
treadable distances, the trodden field,
and my strangest self-discovering.
She slept the world. O singing god, and stayed,
while you were shaping her, with no desire
to wake, and only rose to fall asleep?
Where is her death? Oh, shall you find this deep
unsounded theme before your sound expire?
Sinking to where from me?. . . Almost a maid . . .
III
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.
IV
Step now and then, you gentle-hearted,
into the breath not breathed for you,
let it blow over your cheeks, and parted,
quiver behind you, united anew.
Blissful spirits no conflict harrows,
starters, surely, of many a heart.
Bows for arrows and targets for arrows,
divinelier smiling through tears that smart.
Be not afraid of suffering, render
heaviness back to the earth again;
mountains are heavy, and seas, and the tender
trees that in childhood you set in their places
have grows too heavy for you to sustain.
Ah, but the breezes. . . ah, but the spaces. . .
V
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 take
thought about 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.
VI
Does he belong here? No, his spreading
nature from either domain has sprung.
Withes would they weave in a cunninger wedding,
hands to which roots of the willow had clung.
Going to bed, never leave on the table
bread or milk, forcing the dead to rise. --
He shall invoke them, he who is able
to mingle in mildness of closing eyes
their appearance with all that we view;
he for whom magic of earth-smoke and rue
shall be clear as the clearest link between things.
Nothing can weaken the image he saves,
whether from dwellings, whether from graves,
glorifying pitchers or bracelets or rings.
VII
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 lustre,
sacred example will open his mouth.
All becomes vineyard, all becomes cluster,
warmed by his sympathy's ripening south.
Crypts and the mouldering 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.
VIII
Only Praise's realm may Lamentation
traverse, naiad of the weeping spring;
watching over our precipitation,
till our tears are crystals, blazoning
that same rock that bears the gates and altars.
Round her quiet shoulders, as she broods,
look, a tiny dawn of feeling falters
she's the youngest of the sister-moods.
Triumph knows, and Longing makes confession, --
Lamentation learns: in nightly session
counts, with maiden-hands, old tribulation.
Then, however inexpertly limned,
lifts our voices in a constellation
to the sky her breathing has not dimmed.
IX
Only by him with whose lays
shades were enraptured
may the celestial praise
faintly be captured.
Only who tasted their own
flower with the sleeping
holds the most fugitive tone
ever in keeping.
Make but the mirroring pond
's fleetingly tendered
image endure!
Not till both here and beyond
voices are rendered
lasting and pure.
X
Welcome, whose meaning in me so long,
coffins of stone, has been quietly growing, --
you the Romans' gladdening water's flowing
through to-day as a wandering song;
you also, as open to all delight
as a wakening shepherd's eyes,
full of stillness and flowering nettle and flight
of delirious butterflies;
welcome to all we have snatched like this
from doubt, the mouths re-endowed with power
of speech, after knowing what silence is.
Knowing it or not, friends -- which is our case? --
Both alike has the lingering hour
graved in the human face.
XI
Search the heavens. Is no 'Horse-man' reckoned
there in starry outline? For we share
much with that proud earth. And with a second,
driving, curbing, whom it has to bear.
Is not this, first hunted and then broken,
just the nature of the course we run?
Turf and turning. Pressure, nothing spoken.
New horizones. And the two are one.
Are they though? Or are they never able
both to choose the way they both pursue?
Severingly unlike are field and table.
Even those uniting stars beguile.
Still, it gladdens and suffices too
to believe the symbol for a while.
XII
Hail. the spirit able to unite!
For we truly live our lives in symbol,
and with tiny paces move our nimble
clocks beside our real day and night.
Still we somehow act in true relation,
we that find ourselves we know not where.
Distant station feels for distant station --
what seemed empty space could bear. . .
purest tension. Harmony of forces!
Do not just our limited resources
keep all interference from your flow?
Does the farmer, anxiously arranging,
ever reach to where the seed is changing
into summer? Does not Earth bestow?
XIII
Banana, rounded apple, russet pear,
goodeberry. . . Does not all this convey
life and death into your mouth? . . . It's there! . . .
Read it on a child's face any day,
when it tastes them. What infinity!
Can't you feel inside your mouth a growing
mysteriousness, and, where words were, a flowing
of suddenly released discovery?
Dare to say what 'apple' has implied!
Sweetness, concentrated, self-repressing,
slowly yielding to the tongue's caressing,
growing awake, transparent, clarified,
double-meaning'd, sunshine-full, terrestrial: --
O experience, feeling, joy, -- celestial!
XIV
Our life-long neighbours, flower, vine-leaf, fruit,
they do not merely speak the season's speech.
These things so brightly manifest, that reach
from darkness, gleam, it may be, with the mute
envy of those through whom the earth grows strong.
What do we know about the part they play?
To mix their unused marrow with the clay
has been their second-nature for so long.
But do they do it for their own accords?
Is it by sullen slaves that these clenched fruits
are laboured and thrust forth to us, their lords?
Are they not lords, who sleep beside the roots,
and grant us, what their plenty never misses,
this middle-thing, made of dumb strength and kisses?
XV
Stay, . . . this is good . . . But already it's flown.
. . . Murmurs of music, a footing, a humming: --
Maidens, so warm, so mute, are you coming
to dance the taste of this fruit we've known?
Dance the orange. Who can forget it,
the way it would drown in itself, -- how, too,
it would struggle against its sweetness. And yet it
's been yours. Been deliciously changed into you.
Dance the orange. The landscape, create it
warm from yourselves, till its airs be enfolding
again the splendour they ripened! Loose,
glowingly, fragrance on fragrance! Relate it
all to the peel, so chastely withholding,
all to the joyfully plentiful juice!
XVI
The reason, friend, you feel so alone . . .
With our words and our pointings, little by little
we're making -- who knows? -- perhaps the most brittle,
most perilous part of the world our own.
Who among us can point to a smell? --
Yet there's many a power we obscurely dread
which you can feel . . . You're aware of the dead,
and you shrink away from the conjurer's spell.
Look, our tasks are really the same:
dealt out a puzzle of parts, to endeavour
to make it a whole. Hard to help you. Never
plant me in your heart. I should grow too well.
But I will guide my master's hand and exclaim:
This is Esau here in his own rough fell.
XVII
Undermost he, the earth-bound
root of uprearing
multitudes, source underground,
never appearing.
Helmet and hunting-horn,
words of the aging,
rage between brothers-born,
women assuaging.
Branch on branch, time on time,
vainly they spire. . .
One free! Oh, climb . . . oh, climb . . .
One, though the others drop,
curves, as it scales the top,
into a lyre.
XVIII
Master, there's something new
droning and drumming.
It has heralds too,
praising its coming.
Ill though our ears withstand
such perturbation,
now the machines demand
their celebration.
Source of our weakness
now, and in vengeful rage
ruining our heritage,
us shall these things at length,
us, who supply their strength,
serve in all meekness.
XIX
Change though the world may as fast
as cloud-collections,
home to the changeless at last
fall all perfections.
Over the thrust and the throng.
freer and higher,
echoes your preluding song,
god with the lyre.
Sorrow we misunderstand,
love we have still to begin,
death and what's hidden therein
await unveiling.
Song along circles the land,
hallowing and hailing.
XX
But what shall I offer you, Master, say,
you who taught all creatures to hear? --
The remembered evening of one spring day,
in Russia, a horse drawing near . . .
White, coming up from the village alone,
on one fetlock a tethering-block,
to spend the night alone, on his own:
how gaily he tossed the shock
of his mane in time to his mounting mood
on that rudely encumbered race!
How they leapt, the springs of the equine blood!
He had followed the call of space.
He sang and he listened -- your cycle swept
unbrokenly through him.
His image: accept.
XXI
Spirng has come again. Earth's a-bubble
with all those poems she knows by heart, --
oh, so many. . . With prize for the trouble
of such long learning, her holidays start.
Stern was her teacher, he'd over-task her
from time to time; but we liked the snows
in the old man's beard; and now we can ask her
what green, what blue are: she knows, she knows.
Eager to catch you, Earth, happy creature,
play with the children now outpouring!
Conqueringly foremost the happiest springs.
All she has ever been taught by her teacher,
all that's imprinted in roots and soaring
difficult stems, -- she sings, she sings!
XXII
We wax for waning.
Count, though, Time's journeying
as but a little thing
in the Remaining.
End of unmeasured
hasting will soon begin;
only what's leisured
leads us within.
Boys, don't be drawn too far
into attempts at flight,
into mere swiftness. -- Look
how rested all things are:
shadow and fall of light,
blossom and book.
XXIII
Only when flight shall soar
not for its own sake only
up into heaven's lonely
silence, and be no more
merely the lightly profiling,
proudly successful tool,
playmate of winds, beguiling
time there, careless and cool:
only when some pure Whither
outweighs boyish insistence
on the achieved machine
will who has journeyed thither
be, in that fading distance
all that his flight has been.
XXIV
Shall those primeval friends of ours, the unfated,
ever-unsuing gods, because they are nought for
the hard-faced steel we have sternly nursed, be repudiated,
or else within some map be suddenly sought for?
Those overmastering friends, who are always reaving
the dead from us, brush nowhere against our wheels.
Now we have left the welcoming bath and the old guest-meals
far behind, we find their messengers tardy beyond believing,
we that can overtake them. Lonely misunderstanders
one of another we wholly depend on at every turning,
nowadays the ways we led in lovely meanders
run right ahead. In boilers only are burning
the former fires and heaving the heavier-growing
hammers. But we are like swimmers whose strength is going.
XXV
Now it is you, though, you whom I never
knew but as some unnamable flower, I will try
once more to recall and show them, vanished for ever,
beautiful playmate of, ah, the invincible cry.
Dancer, who all of a sudden, her body rebelling,
stopped, as her youth had been bronzed into art,
mournfully hearkening. -- Then, from the Ever-Impelling,
music entered into her altered heart.
Sickness was near. In grip of the shadows already,
darklier thrusted the blood, though defiantly ready
to surge to its natural spring-tide just as before.
Time and again out of darkness emerged with a mocking
earthly effulgence. Then, after terrible knocking,
entered a hopelessly open door.
XXVI
You that could sound till the end, though, immortal accorder,
seized by the scorn-maddened Maenads' intemperate throng,
wholly outsounded their cries when in musical order
soared from the swarm of deformers your formative song.
Wrestle and rage as they might on that fated career,
none was able to shatter your head or your lyre:
hard stones hurled at your heart could only acquire
gentleness, soon as they struck you, and power to hear.
Though they destroyed you at last and revenge had its will,
sound of you lingered in lions and rocks you were first to
enthral, in the trees and the birds. You are singing there still.
O you god that has vanished! You infinite track!
Only because dismembering hatred dispersed you
are we hearers to-day and a mouth which else Nature would lack.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by J. B. Leishman)