Part I I. 1
There arose a tree. Oh, pure transcension!
Oh, Orpheus sings! Oh, tall tree in the ear!
And all was still. But even in this suspension
new beginnings, signs, and changes were.
Animals from the silence, from the clear
now opened wood came forth from nest and den;
and it so came to pass that not from fear
or craftiness were they so quiet then,
but to be listening. Howling, cry, roar
seemed little to their hearts. Where scarece a humble
hut for such reception was before
a hiding-place of the obscurest yearning,
with entrance shaft whose underpinnings tremble,
you made for the beasts temples in the hearing.
I. 2
She was almost a girl and forth she leaped
from this harmonious joy of song and lyre,
shining through her springtime veils and clear,
she made herself a bed in my ear. And slept
in me. Her sleep was everything. The trees
that I had always loved so much, and these
palpable distances, the field I felt,
and each amazement that to me befell.
She slept the world. Ah, singing god, how have
you so perfected her, she did not crave
to waken first? She rose and fell asleep.
Where is her death? Before your song is lost,
can you not find this motif? To what deeps
does she sink from me -- where? . . . A girl almost . . .
I. 3
A god can do it. But how shall a man, say,
get to him through the narrow lyre and follow?
His mind's dichotomy. Where two heartways
cross there stands no temple for Apollo.
Song, as you explain it, is not passion,
not striving for some end at last attained;
song is Being. Easy for gods to fashion,
But when shall we be? And when will he bend
the earth and stars upon our being? Youth,
it is not that you are in love; although
the voice bursts your mouth open, you must find
how to forget your rash song. That will go.
It is another breath that sings the truth.
A breath round nothing. A gust in the god. A wind.
I. 4
O you tender ones, sometimes walk
into the breath not intended for you;
let it divide against your cheeks,
behind you it trembles, joined anew.
O you blessed, whole ones, you
who seem to be the beginning of hearts.
Bows for arrows, targets for darts,
more everlasting your smile shines through
the tears. Don't fear to suffer pain;
give the heaviness back to earth's weight again;
heavy are mountains, heavy the seas.
Those you planted as children, ah, those trees
are long since too heavy for you to bear.
But the spaces . . . but the windy air . . .
I. 5
Erect no monumenr. But let the roses
blossom every year for his memory's sake.
For it is Orpheus. His metamorphosis
into this one and that. We need not take
trouble for other names. Once and for all,
it's Orpheus when there's song. He comes and goes.
Is it not much if sometimes a few days
he outlives the roses in the bowl?
He has to vanish, so you'll understand:
Even though himself he fears this evanescence.
For while his word surpasses this existence,
he's gone alone already in the distance.
The lyre's grating does not curb his hands.
He is obedient, even when he transgresses.
I. 6
Does he belong here? No, from both
realms his ample nature has grown.
One to whom the roots were known
could bend more deftly the willow's growth.
Never leave milk on the table or bread
when you go to sleep; that lures the dead.
But let him who conjures them to rise,
under the gentle lids of his eyes
mix their ghosts with all he perceives;
may the spell of fumitory and rue
be real for him as the clearest things.
Nothing impairs the symbol that's true;
be it from houses, be it from graves,
let him praise bracelet, pitcher, and ring.
I. 7
Praising, that's it! One ordained to praise,
he sprang like ore from the silence of stone.
His heart, oh, perishable winepress
of an infinite wine, for man alone.
His voice no dust can choke or dim
when divine instance seizes him.
All turns vineyard, clusters of grapes,
in his susceptible south grown ripe.
Nor mold in the kings' sepulchers
gives the lie to his landings, nor
that from the gods a shadow falls.
Of the abiding messengers,
he reaches far into death's door
glorious fruit in golden bowls.
I. 8
Only in the land of Praise can Lamentation
work: the guardian nymph of thw weeping source,
she watches over our precipitation,
that it run clearly on the rocky base,
the same on which the gates and altars stand.
See, around her tranquil shoulders broods
the dawning feeling: she, of all the band,
is the youngest of the Passions' sisterhood.
Rejoicing knows, and Longing is contrite:
only Lament still learns; and night by night
tallies with girlish hands the ancient evil.
But suddenly, unpracticed and awry,
she holds a star-sign of our voices high
against a sky her breathing does not trouble.
I. 9
Only whoso has raised
among the Shades his lyre
dares, with foreboding, aspire
to offer infinite praise.
No one but that one
who has eaten with the dead
their poppies will never forget
the softest tone.
Though the picture in the pool
before us grow dim:
Make the image yours.
Only in the dual
realm will voices become
eternal and pure.
I. 10
Antique sarcophagi, who have never
left my feelings, I greet you, from whom
the joyous waters of days in Rome
flow as a wandering song forever.
Or you so open, like the eyes
of a happy awakening shepherd: tombs
full of silence and dead-nettle bloom
whence fluttered enchanted butterflies;
all who are delivered from doubt,
I greet, the mouths now open anew,
already aware what silence means.
Do we know it, friends, or do we not?
The lingering hour molds these two
on the countenance of man.
I. 11
Look at the sky. is there no constellation
called "Horseman"? For this pride from earth we bear,
strangely engraven. And a second's there,
who rides and spurs and guides its destination.
Is not this being whipped and then restrained
like our existence, the sinew and the bone?
Highway and turning. But a touch explains.
New open vistas. And the two are one.
But are they that? Or do not they both mean
the road they go together? Then between,
the utter separation of table and trough.
Even stellar conjunctions can deceive.
But let us rejoice a short time to believe
the figure as a symbol. That's enough.
I. 12
Hail to the spirit that can unite us;
for we live really in figures. Always
go the clocks with little strides
along with our intrinsic days.
Without knowing our proper place,
we act as if from true relations.
The antennae feel their sister-stations,
and the emptiness of space
bore . . . pure tension. O music of forces!
Aren't the interruptions turned away
by the indulgent affairs of the day?
However the peasant works and sows,
he never reaches those deep sources
where seeds turn into summer. Earth bestows.
I. 13
Full-plumped apple, gooseberry and pear,
banana . . . all these speak
death and life in the mouth . . . I divine there . . .
read it on a child's cheek
who tastes them. This comes from afar. Will it be
in the mouth something nameless, slow?
Where words were once, discoveries flow,
out of the fruit's flesh, surprised and ser free.
Dare to say what you name Apple. This
sweetness, first condensing, thus
gently created in the taste,
becomes awake, transparent, clear,
ambiguous, sunny, earthy, here --
oh, experience, feeling, joy -- how vast!
I. 14
We have to do with flower, grape leaf, fruit.
They speak not only the language of the year.
Out of the dark a pied display appears,
perhaps by the envy of those underfoot
made bright: the dead who give earth strength anew.
How do we know what part they make their own?
This long time they have larded through and through
the clay, with the frank morrow of their bones.
Now arises the question: if this is
gladly done? This work of sullen salves,
does this globed fruit press toward us, their lords?
Are they the masters, in their rooty graves
sleeping, who grant from their abundant hoards
the mogrel begotten of dumb strength and kisses?
I. 15
Wait . . . that tastes good . . . It flies away fast.
. . . Just a bit of music, a trampling, a humming:
girls, you warm, you silent girls coming,
dance the taste of the fruit you test!
Dance the orange. Who can forget it,
how it drowns in itself, yet strives not to do
what makes it sweet! Now you have got it:
exquisitely, it has become you.
Dance the orange. The warmer land,
project from you, so this ripe fruit glisten
in its native air! Oh, ardently fling
off fragrance on fragrance. Create the relation
with the pure, the unyielding rind,
with the juice that brims this happy thing!
I. 16
You, my friend, are so alone,
because . . . with words and pointing fingers
slowly we make the world our own,
perhaps the frailest part, most full of danger.
Who points with his finger to a smell? --
But of the powers that we dread
you feel many . . . you know the dead
and are frightened by the sorcerer's spell.
Look, we together must bear alway
parcel and part, like a whole at last.
It's hard to help you. Don't plant me in
your heart -- for I would grow too fast.
But I'll guide my master's hand and say:
Here. This is Esau in his skin.
I. 17
The first, confused, the Ancient,
the root of what's been,
the sources, concealed and latent
that's never been seen.
Helmet and hunter's horn,
graybeards' absolutes,
wrath between men born
brothers, women like lutes . . .
Branch pushing branch, on the tree
not one twig is free . . .
then one! oh, higher, higher! . . .
But they still are breaking.
The highest if taking
shape as a lyre.
I. 18
Master, you hear the New,
trembling and droning?
Come now heralds who
praise it, intoning.
Really no hearing's still
hale in this turmoil,
but the machines will
have praise for toil.
See how it storms
in a rage to devour,
enervates us, deforms.
Since we gave it power,
let it run cool
and serve as a tool.
I. 19
Though the world change as fast
as cloud-shapes manifold,
all things perfected at last
fall back to the very old.
Past flux and vicissitude,
more freely and higher
still endures your prelude,
god with the lyre.
We do not understand
grief, nor love's phases,
and what death keeps concealed
is not unveiled
Only song through the land
hallows and praises.
I. 20
What shall I dedicate, Master, say,
to you who taught the creatures to hear? --
My memory of one spring day,
at evening, in Russia -- a white horse there . . .
Across from the village he came alone,
a hobble on his fore fetlock,
for a night in the meadow, on his own;
on his neck tossed the shock
of his mane in time to his fiery mood,
in that clumsy gallop arrested.
What leaping fountains of stallion-blood!
He felt the spaces, oh, how great!
He neighed and listened--in him was invested
your saga.
His image I dedicate.
I. 21
Spring has come back again. The earth
is like a child who has memorized
poems, oh, many! . . . now it seems worth
the effort, for she wins the prize.
Her teacher was strict. We loved the white
hair of the old man's beard.
When we ask what the green and the blue are, right
off she knows every word.
Lucky earth, with your holiday,
and all the children coming to play!
We try to catch you. The gayest will do it.
Teacher trained her until she knew it,
and all that's printed in roots and long
unruly stems she sings in a song.
I. 22
We are the drivers.
But take time's stride
as trivial beside
what lasts forever.
The transient hastens
and soon will be over;
only what lingers
hallows and chastens.
Boys, on speed waste
no courage or power,
or on trails of flight.
Now all things rest:
darkness and light,
the book and the flower.
I. 23
Oh, first when the flight
shall no longer arise
for its own sake in the sky's
stillness, and in bright
profile, be self-sufficient
a successful instrument,
a playful pet of the winds,
surely wheeling and slim --
not till the pure goal means
more than the growing machines
to youthful pride, will he,
by the winning overthrown,
who nears the distance be
what he is flying alone.
I. 24
Should we disown our oldest friendships, part
from the never-suing gids, because the hard
steel that we so rigorously have reared
does not know them? Or suddenly seek them on a chart?
These mighty friends, who take from us the dead,
nowhere touch our wheels. We've moved afar
our banquets and our baths; their messengers
are long too slow for us, so we have sped
past them. Now more lonely, one on another
wholly dependent, yet ignorant of each other,
we build no paths with fine meandering turns,
but by the gradient. Only in boilers burn
the former fires, lifting the hammers, ever
heavier. But we grow weak, like swimmers.
I. 25
Once more I will remember you whom I knew
like a flower with an unknown name; yet I
will show you to them, ravished from us, you
lovely playmate of the invincible cry.
Dancer at first, then the hesitant body stoof
suddenly, as if youth were cast in bronze;
sorrowing, listening. Then from the empowered ones
music sank into her altered blood.
Sickness drew near. Already by shadows mastered,
the darkened blood, half-suspect, could not wait,
but surged, toward its natural springtime bounding.
Again and again, interrupted by dark and disaster,
it glittered, earthly. Till after terrible pounding
it entered the desolate open gate.
I. 26
But you, divine one, unto the last still singing,
although attacked by the flouted Maenads' throng,
beautiful god, above the shrieks rose ringing
among the destoryers your ordered upbuilding song.
There was none there could harm your head or harp,
however they raved and struggled; all the sharp
stones they cast at you grew soft when nearing
your heart and, touching you, were endowed with hearing.
Finally, driven by vengeance, they broke and tore
your body, but in cliffs and lions lingered
your music, in birds and trees. You still sang there.
O you lost god! You never-ending clue!
Only since hatred at last parceled you
among us, are we hearers and a mouth for nature.
* * *
Part II
II. 1
Breath, you invisible poem! Pure
exchange unceasing between the great
ether and our existence. Counterweight
in which I rhythmically occur.
Single billow slow degrees
of ocean take place
in me; most frugal, you, of all possible seas --
winnings of space.
How many parts of this space already were
within me! There's many a wind
like a son to me.
Do you know me, air, full of places where I used to be?
You, once smooth rind,
roundness and leaf of my words.
II. 2
Even as a handy sheet of paper
sometimes catches a genuine master-stroke,
so, often into themselves the mirrors
take the one blessed smile of girls who awoke
and tried out the morning, alone --
or in the attendant lights' glitter.
And where the breath of their real faces shone
there falls but a mere reflection, later.
What have eyes once seen in the blackening coals
slowly cooling upon the hearth?
Glimpses of life, forever lost.
Ah, who knows the losses of earth?
Only one, who praises nevertheless,
can sing the heart born into the Whole.
II. 3
Mirrors: still no one knowing has told
what your essential nature is.
You, entirely filled, as with holes
of sieves, you, time's interstices.
You, wastrels still of the empty hall --
broad as the woods, when the twilight falls . . .
and the chandelier, like a sixteen-pointer,
pierces you none else can enter.
Often you are full of paintings. A few
seem to have passed straight into you;
others you timidly sent past.
But the loveliest one will stay, till there
to her withheld cheeks the unbounded clear
Narcissus forces his way at last.
II. 4
Oh, this is the animal that never was.
They did not know it and, for all of that,
they loved his neck and posture, and his gait,
clean to the great eyes with their tranquil gaze.
Really it was not. Of their love they made it,
this pure creature. And they left a space
always, till in this clear uncluttered place
lightly he raised his head and scarcely needed
to be. They did not feed him any corn,
only the possibility he might
exist, which gave the beast such strength, he bore
a horn upon the forehead. Just one horn.
Unto a virgin he appeared, all white,
and was in the silver mirror and in her.
II. 5
Flower-muscle of the anemone
that little by little opens to the meadow-dawn,
until light's mighty polyphone pours down
into the womb from the sonorous sky,
muscle of infinite receptivity
so tautened in the still star of the bloom,
often with such abundance overcome
that the sunset's beckoning peacefully
is barely strong enough again to give
the far-sprung petal rims to you: O power
and resolution of how many worlds!
We, the violent, though we endure
longer, when, in which of all our lives
are we receivers finally unfurled?
II. 6
Roses, you on a throne, in antiquity
were a calyx in a simple ring.
But to us you're the full flower, an innumerably
inexhaustible thing.
In your richness you shine, with garment on garment
on a body of nothing but radiance;
yet a single petal is at once the avoidance
and denial of any raiment.
Your fragrance calls its sweetest names
across the centuries to us;
suddenly it lies plain in the air as fame.
But we do not know what to name it, we guess . . .
and memory surrenders to it all
that we have begged from hours evocable.
II. 7
Flowers, finally to ordering hands related
(hands of girls of long ago and today),
who often across the garden table lay,
meekly wounded and wilted,
awaiting the water to make you recover
from the death begun -- now raised anew
between the dripping poles of tender
fingers that can do,
light ones, even better than you guessed,
when you came to in the vase, and cooling
slowly give out the warmth of girls, like confessed
sins, how wearisome and gloomy,
committed by being picked, a bond made newly
with them who are your confederates in blooming.
II. 8
You few playmates of childhood long ago
in scattered city gardens: how we found
each other and grew hesitantly fond
and, like the lamb with the speaking scroll, although
speaking, were silent. All our fun belonged
to no one. Whose could it be?
And how it dissolved wherever people thronged,
and under the long year's anxiety!
Carriages passed us, strangers. Solid, dark,
houses stood near, make-believe -- and none
knew us ever. What was real in the All?
Nothing. Except the balls. Their splendid arcs.
Not even the children . . . but sometimes there was one,
ah, dying, who walked under the falling ball.
In memoriam Egon von Rilke
II. 9
Do not boast, you judges, of icons not clamped
on necks, or of the spared racks and thumbscrew.
No heart is lifted, none -- since the purposed cramp
of mercy is more gently twisting you.
What it's had from time the scaffold gives back again,
as children the toys from birthdays of last year.
Into the lofty, gate-like heart, the pure
and open heart, how different he'd enter then,
the gods of true mercy. Violently come and grip
with radiance round him, like the gods, his kin.
More than a wind for the confident great ships.
Not less than the gentle secret perception
that overcomes us silently within,
like a quietly playing child of an infinite conception.
II. 10
All we have won is threatened by the machine, so long
as it, instead of obeying, as spirit dares to command.
For the more resolute building it cuts more stiffly the stone,
lest it shine from the fairer lingering of the master-hand.
Nowhere stands the machine aside, that we escape once,
where it ouls and belongs to itself in the factory without noise.
It is life -- and it believes in its omniscience,
as with like resolution it orders and makes and destroys.
But still for us existence is enchanted: from a hundred places
it is still origin. A play of pure forces
that no one touches unless he kneels and admires.
The Unutterable, words fragilely slip by . . .
and from the most vibrant stones music anew aspires
building her deified house in the useless space of the sky.
II. 11
Many a quietly ordered rule of death now prevails,
onpressing, conquering man, since you undertook hunting first;
but better than trap and net, I know you, strip of sail,
that they let down into the caverns of Karst.
Gently they slipped you in, as if you were a pledge
to celebrate peace. But then, the fellow twisted your edge --
and a handful of white and reeling doves was thrown by the night
from the caverns into the day . . .
but even that has its right.
After from the spectators be every breath of compassion,
not only from the hunter, who vigilantly takes heed
and effects the timely deed/
Killing is only an aspect of the wandering grief we endure . . .
To the spirit without passion
what happens to us is pure.
II. 12
Will the transformation. Of, be inspired by the burning
flame in which something that boasts of transformation withdraws;
that scheme-devising spirit, which masters earthly laws,
loves nothing so much in the soaring of symbols as the point of turning.
What shuts itself in abiding is already numb. It believes
itself safe in the shelter of unorstentatious gray?
Wait, a hardest forwarns the hard from far away.
Alas, an absent hammer upheaves!
He who pours out himself as a spring is perceived by Perceiving,
that conducts him enraptured through all the cheerful creation,
which often ends at the start and begins at the end.
Every happy space is a child or a grandchild of Leaving,
in which they wander astounded. And Daphne, since transformation,
feeling herself laurel, wills that you change to a wind.
II. 13
Keep ahead of all parting, as if it were behind
you, like the winter that is just now passed.
In winters you are so endlessly winter, you find
that, getting through winter, your heart on the whole will last.
Be ever dead in Eurydice -- arise singing
with greater praise, rise again to the pure relation.
Among the fleeting, in the realm of declination,
be a resonant glass that shatters while it is ringing.
Be -- at the same time, know the terms of negation,
the infinite basis of your fervent vibration,
that you may completely complete it this one time.
To teeming nature's store of used, as of dumb
and moldy things, to that uncountable count,
add yourself joyously, and annul the amount.
II. 14
Look at the flowers, faithful to earth's ways,
to whom we lend fate from fate's very rim --
but who knows? If they grieve that they decay,
we must be the grief for them.
All wills to float, yet heavily here and there,
we lie on everything, glad of our weight;
what consuming teaches we are for the Things to bear,
that are happy in their ever-childish state.
If one took them into intimate sleep and slept
deeply with the Things, ah, how light he would grow!
changed in a new day, out of the common depth.
Or maybe he would stay; and they'd flower and acclaim
him, the converted, who would then be like them,
all the still brothers and sisters where meadow-winds blow.
II. 15
O fountain-mouth, you giver, O you round
mouth speaking inexhaustibly one pure
thing, you mask of marble placed before
the flowing face of water. The background
is marching aqueducts. From far away,
passing the tombs, from the slope of the Apennines,
they carry to you what you are going to say,
which beyond the black ageing of your chin
falls into the basin there below.
This is the ear laid down, asleep,
the ear of marble into which you speak
forever. An ear of earth. She talks alone
to herself, and when sometimes a pitcher's slipped
under the flow, she thinks you interrupt.
II. 16
Always torn open by us again,
the god is the place that heals.
We are Sharpness, because we will
to know, he's divided and serene.
Even the pure, the avowed donation
he accepts in his world in so far as he
opposes himself to the free
end, without motion.
We hear the flowing from that well
where none but the dead drink,
when the god beckons them silently, the dead.
Only its hubbub's offered us instead.
And with a more quiet instinct
the lamb begs for his bell.
II. 17
Where, in that ever-happily watered garden, on what trees,
from what tenderly stripped flower-calices
ripen the strange fruits of consolation? Those delicate fruits
of which you perhaps find one underfoot
in the trodden field of your poverty. Time after time,
you're amazed at the size of the fruit, at the tenderness
of uts skin, at its wholesomeness,
and that the carelessness of a bird of envious worm
has not forestalled you. Are there trees, thronged by angels,
by slow and secret gardeners tended so strangely,
that they bear for us, without our being the owners?
Have we never been able, we phantoms and shades,
by our actions, too early ripened and soon to fade,
to disturb the serenity of these impertubable summers?
II. 18
Dancer: O you translation
of all transiency into action, how you made it clear!
And the whirl of the finish, that tree of motion,
didn't it wholly take it in the hard-won year?
And didn't its summit, so that your flourish just now could swarm
about it, blossom with stillness? And up in the blue
wasn't it summer and sunlight, with the warm
immeasurable warmth from you?
But it also bore, it bore, your tree of rapture.
Aren't these its peaceful fruits: the pitcher
striped with ripening, and the more ripened vase?
And in the decoration: has not the drawing
endured, the dark line your eyebrows traces
swiftly in the texture of their own turning?
II. 19
Somewhere lives gold in the indulgent bank,
on familiar terms with thousands. Nevertheless,
that blindman, the beggar, to a penny's like
a lost place, a dusty corner behind the clothes-press.
Money feels quite at home in all the shops,
plausibly dressed in silk, with carnations and furs.
But the silent beggar waits in all the stops
between the breaths of all money that sleeps or stirs.
Oh, how can it close at night, that ever-open hand?
Tomorrow fate brings it again, holds it out every day:
miserable, infinitely destructible, clear.
If but some clairvoyant could at last understand
astonished, and praise its duration, as only a singer may!
For only a god to hear.
II. 20
Between the stars, how far, and still much farther
is what one learns by existence.
Someone, for instance, a child . . . a neighbor . . . another --
oh, how inconceivably distant.
Maybe destiny measures us with spans of being,
and thuse seems inauspicious;
but think, how many spans between the girl fleeing
and the man whom she wishes.
Everything is remote -- and nowhere does the circle close.
On the cheerfully set table, see in the dish
how odd are the faces of fish.
Fish are mute . . . one used to think. Who knows?
But is there no place at last where, from each to each
there is something that might be language, without speech?
II. 21
Sing, my heart, the unknown gardens poured
crystalline, inaccessible, as in glass
Sing their rapture, praise them as compared
to none, those waters and roses of Shiraz
or Ispahan. My heart, show you never miss them.
That their ripening figs intend themselves for you.
That you are the friend of breezes blowing through
the flowering boughs, increasing as if to visions.
Avoid the mistake of thinking privations's caused
by a resolution taken, that is: to be!
Silken thread, you were woven in the frame.
No matter what pattern you feel most inwardly
(though it be a moment from the life of pain),
remember, a whole grand carpet is proposed.
II. 22
Oh, the splendid overflow, in spite of fate,
of our existence. In the parks, foaming, out-poured --
or as stone figures, under the balconies reared,
beside the keystones of the lofty gates!
Oh, the brzen bell each dat upeaving
against the banal everyday its cudgel.
Or the one, the column, the column outliving
in Karnak the almost eternal temple.
Today the same surpluses rush past, but as naught
save speed, from the yellow horizontal day
into the light-bedazzled immoderate night.
But, leaving no trace, the delirium fades away,
The curves through the air and those who guided the flight,
none is in vain perhaps. But just as if thought.
II. 23
Call me to one of your hours, the space
that always opposes you:
suppliant, close as a dog's face,
but always turning away anew
when you believe it's finally caught.
That is most yours which is thus withdrawn.
We are free, for where we thought
to have been welcomed, we were sent on.
Anxiously we crave a hold,
we, too young often for what is old
and too old for what never happened.
We are just but to what we praise anyhow,
for, ah, we are the iron and the bough
and the sweetness of danger that ripens.
II. 24
Oh, this pleasure, always new, from the loosened clay!
Almost no one helped in the earliest ventures.
But, despite that, cities rose by happy bays;
in spite of it, oil and water filled the pitchers.
The gods, we project them first with hardihood,
and surly destiny destroys them again.
But they are the deathless ones. Look here, we should
hear him through who will hear us in the end.
We, a race through thousands of years: fathers
and mothers, ever more full of the future birth,
which, one day surpassing us, will shatter us, later.
We, we the endlessly risked, what aeons we own!
And only Death, the laconic, knows what we're worth
and how much he always gains when puts us on loan.
II. 25
Already, listen, you hear the first harrows
at work: again man's rhythm teem
in the tense stillness of tomorrow's
strong spring earth. What is coming seems
inspid no longer. Not the same
as that last year, but as something new.
Always expected, but when it came,
you never got it. It got you.
Even by the leaves of the wintered oaks
at evening a future brown's revealed.
Often the breezes exchange tokens.
Black are the bushes, but piles of dung
of a richer black lie on the fields.
Each passing hour grows more young.
II. 26
We are stirred by a bird's cry . . .
any once-created crying.
But outside, the children playing
cry beyond the actual cries.
Cry the hazard. Into the spaces
of ether (where the bird's cry passes
unscathed, like men in dreams),
they drive the wedges of their screams.
Alas, where are we? Ever more free,
like loose kites, with edges of laughter,
we race through mid-air, wind-tattered.
-- Singing god! set in order these cries,
so they may awaken roaringly,
as a river bearing the head and the lyre.
II. 27
Does it really exist, this destroyer, Time?
When will it break the castle to shards
on the calm mountain? And the demiurge tame
this heart that forever belongs to the gods?
Are we really so fearfully fragile
as fate would prove to us?
Is childhood, deep and full of promise,
in the roots -- later -- tranquil?
Ah, the specter of the transient,
like a smoke-wraith, passes
through the guileless receiver.
As what we are, as drivers,
we count among permanent
powers for divine uses.
II. 28
Oh, come and go. You, almost a child, complete
for an instant the dance-figure, that it be
a pure constellation by which we beat
the order of stupid nature transiently.
Yes, for it was nature that first stirred
fully just to listen to Orpheus' song.
You were excited from the time you heard
and felt it strange when any tree thought long
whether it would go with you by ear.
You still knew where the lyre was raised to call,
resounding -- the unheard-of center. Therefore,
you tried the lovely steps and hoped to turn
the eyes and footsteps of your friend to learn
for once the whole and healing festival.
II. 29
Still friend of many distances, feel yet
how your breathing is augmenting space.
From the beamwork of gloomy belfried let
yourself ring. What devours you will increase
more strongly from this food. Explore and win
knowledge of transformation through and through.
What experience was the worst for you?
Is drinking bitter, you must turn to wine.
Be the magic power of this immense
midnight at the crossroads of your senses,
be the purport of their strange meeting. Though
earth itself forgot your very name,
say unto the tranquil earth: I flow.
To the fleeting water speak: I am.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by C. F. Macintyre)