Ode to a Nightingale

I

My heart aches, and a drwosy numbness pains

    My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

    One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

    But being too happy in thine happiness --

        That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

            In some melodious plot

    Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

        Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

II

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

    Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

    Dance and Provencal wong, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of warm South,

    Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

        With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

            And purple-stained mouth,

    That I might drink and leave the world unseen,

        And with thee fade away into the forest dim --

III

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

    What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever,and the fret

    Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,

    Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

        Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

            And leaden-eyed despairs;

    Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

        Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

IV

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

    Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

    Though the dull brain perplexes and retards.

Already with thee! tender is the night,

    And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

        Clustered around by all her starry Fays;

            But here there is no light,

    Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

        Through verdurorus glooms and winding mossy ways.

V

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

    Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

    Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild --

    White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

        Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;

            And mid-May's eldest child,

 The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

    The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

VI

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

    I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

    To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

    To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

        While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

            In such an ecstasy!

    Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain --

        To thy high requiem become a sod.

VII

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

    No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

    In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

    Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

        She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

            The same that oft-times hath

    Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam

        Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,

VIII

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

    To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

    As she is famed to do, deceiving elf,

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

    Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

        Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep

            In the next valley-glades:

    Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

        Fled is that music -- Do I wake or sleep?

-- John Keats

solution to a complex pressure of needs

"I've never been didactic, never tried to make poetry do things, never gone out to look for it. I waited for it to come to me, in whatever shape it chose."

. . .

"But I did write slowly, partly because you're finding out what to say as well as how to say it, and that takes time."

. . .

"You must realize I've never had "ideas" about poetry. To me it's always been a personal, almost physical release or solution to a complex pressure of needs -- wanting to create, to justify, to praise, to explain, to externalize, depending on the circumstances."

-- Philip Larkin (Paris Review - The Art of Poetry)

Ode on Melancholy

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

        Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer the plae forehead to be kiss'd

        By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

                Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

        Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be

                Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;

        For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

                And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

        Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

        And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

        Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

                Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

        Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

                And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty -- Beauty that must die;

        And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

        Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

        Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

                Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

        Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,

                And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

-- John Keats

where the values are intrinsic

On the Art of Fiction

Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole -- so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. Millet had done hundreds of sketches of peasants sowing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, "The Sower," the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable. All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying, of sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves for one that was better and more universal.

Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. The courage to go on without compromise does not come to a writer all at once -- nor, for that matter, the ability. Both are phases of natural development. In the beginning the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old ideals, and his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights he would like to recapture.

-- Willa Cather

The Garden of Proserpine

Here, where the world is quiet;

    Here, where all trouble seems

Dead winds' and spent waves' riot

    In doubtful dreams of dreams;

I watch the green field growing

For reaping folk and sowing,

For harvest-time and mowing,

    A sleepy world of streams.

I am tired of tears and laughter,

    And men that laugh and weep;

Of what may come hereafter

    For men that sow to reap:

I am weary of days and hours,

Blown buds of barren flowers,

Desires and dreams and powers

    And everything but sleep.

Here life has death for neighbor,

    And far from eye or ear

Wan waves and wet winds labor,

    Weak ships and spirits steer;

They drive adrift, and whither

They wot not who make thither;

But no such winds blow hither,

    And no such things grow here.

No growth of moor or coppice,

    No heather-flower of vine,

But bloomless buds of poppies,

    Green grapes of Proserpine,

Pale beds of blowing rushes

Where no leaf blooms or blushes

Save this whereout she crushes

    For dead men deadly wine.

Pale, without name or number,

    In fruitless fields of corn,

They bow themselves and slumber

    All night till light is born;

And like a soul belated,

In hell and heaven unmated,

By cloud and mist abated

    Comes out of darkness morn.

Though one were strong as seven,

    He too with death shall dwell,

Nor wake with wings in heaven,

    Nor weep for pains in hell;

Though one were fair as roses,

His beauty clouds and closes;

And well though love rposes,

    In the end it is not well.

Pale, beyond porch and portal,

    Crowned with calm leaves, she stands

Who gathers all things mortal

    With cold immortal hands;

Her languid lips are sweeter

Than love's who fears to greet her

To men that mix and meet her

    From many times and lands.

She waits for each and other,

    She waits for all men born;

Forgets the earth her mother,

    The life of fruits and corn;

And spring and seed and swallow

Take wing for her and follow

Where summer song rings hollow

    And flowers are put to scorn.

There go the loves that wither,

    The old loves with wearier wings;

And all dead years draw thither,

    And all disastrous things;

Dead dreams of days forsaken,

Blind buds that snows have shaken,

Wild leaves that winds have taken,

    Red strays of ruined springs.

We are not sure of sorrow,

    And joy was never sure;

Today will die tomorrow;    

    Time stoops to no man's lure;

And love, grown faint and fretful

With lips but half regretful

Sighs, and with eyes forgetful

    Weeps that no love endure.

From too much love of living,

    From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

    Whatever gods may be

That no life lives for ever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

    Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Then star nor sun shall waken,

    Nor any change of light:

Nor sound of waters shaken,

    Nor any sound or sight:

Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,

Nor days nor things diurnal;

Only the sleep eternal

    In an eternal night.

-- Algernon Charles Swinburne

Sonnets to Orpheus: Second Part

I

Breathing, invisible poem! That great

world-space, at each inhalation

exchanged for this human existence. Counter-weight

of my rhythmical realization.

Single wavelet, whose slowly

gathering sea am I;

you, of all possible seas most frugal and lowly, --

space laid-by.

Of all these places in space, how many a one

has been within me already. Many a wind

seems like a son.

Do you know me, air, still full of my dwelling-places?

You, the one-time smooth skinned

rondure and leaf of my phrases.

II

Just as the handiest paper snatches

sometimes for ever the master-stroke,

often only the mirror catches

smiles that nothing will re-evoke

from maidens approving the morning alone,

or the image obsequious lamp-light graces;

and later the real, the breathing faces

merely reflect what was once their own.

What have eyes not gazed into quivering flosses

glowing among logs that have ceased to blaze? --

Glimpses of living, beyond recall.

Earth, O Earth, who could tell your losses?

Only who sang with unfaltering praise

of the heart, born into the midst of it all.

III

Mirrors: no one has yet distilled with

patient knowledge your fugitive

essence. Your 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 lustres 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.

IV

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

within the silver mirror and in her.

V

Flower-muscle, gradually releasing

the anemone's pale meadow-day,

till at length into her lap unceasing

sky-light pours its polyphonic ray;

muscle stretching out that starry-flowered

quietness for endless welcoming;

so at times by fulness overpowered

that the restward call of evening

almost fails to bring your far-extended

petal-edges back to you once more:

world of will and power uncomprehended!

We, the violent, are not so fleeting.

Through what lives though must we pass before

we reach that stage of open-hearted greeting?

VI

You for Antiquity, rose throned in power,

were a calyx with only a single rim,

but for us of to-day you're the full, the numberless flower,

the theme whose depths we can only skim.

Grown so rich, you appear like draping on draping

about a body of air and fire;

though each of your leaves in itself is at once an escaping

and a disowning of all attire.

For centuries, name after sweetest name,

we have heard your fragrance singing:

suddenly it hangs in the air like fame.

And then we find to name it exceeds our powers. . .

And over to it go winging

memories yielded up by recallable hours.

VII

Flowers, whose kinship with ordering hands we are able

to feel at last (girls' hands, of once, of to-day),

who often, strewn all over the garden table.

tired and tenderly injured, lay

waiting for water to come, once more repealing

death already begun, -- and now

uplifted again between the poles of those feeling,

magnetical fingers you have to allow

can be far kinder than delicate you had guessed

on coming round in the jug, to find

you were cooling and slowly exhaling the warmth of girls, like

        things confessed,

like tiring sins remembered in drwosy gloom,

despoiling of you committed, to bind

you to them once more, who blend with you in their bloom.

VIII

You few, the one-time sharers of childhood's treasure

in the city's scattered garden walks,

how we met and awoke in each other a hesitant pleasure,

and, like the lamb with the scroll that talks,

spoke without speaking. If sometimes happiness found us,

no one possessed it. Whose could it be?

And how it would melt among all those moving around us,

and the long year's anxiety.

Unconcerning carriages rolling and swerving,

houses surrounded us strongly - untruthfully, though, and never

a thing that knew us. Was anything real at all?

Nothing. Only the balls. Their glorious curving.

No, not even the children. . . Though one would ever

pass, ah, fleetingly! under the falling ball.

        In memoriam Egon von Rilke    

IX

Boast not, judges, of racks no longer required,

of throats no longer locked in the iron's embrace.

Not one heart has it heightened, that newly-acquired

spasm of mercy's milder grimace.

Things it has slowly collected, the scaffold one day

offers us back, like children their long-ago gifted

birthday toys. He'd enter the pure, the uplifted,

gate-wide open heart in a different way,

the god of genuine mercy. Mightily, spreading

flamelier our from his origin.

More than a wind for the great ships steadily heading.

Potent no less than that gentle unconscious awaring,

silently winning us over within

like the quietly playing child of an infinite paring.

X

Long will machinery menace the whole of our treasure,

while it, unmindful of us, dares to a mind of its own.

Checking the glorious hand's flaunting of lovelier leisure,

now for some stubborner work sternlier it fashions the stone.

Not for an hour will it stay, so that for once we may flee it,

oiling itself in a quiet factory, fitly employed.

Now it is life, no less, and feels best able to be it,

having, with equal resolve, ordered, constructed, destroyed.

Even to-day, though, existence is magical, pouring

freshly from hundreds of well-springs, -- a playing of purest

forces, which none can surprise without humbly adoring.

Words still melt into something beyond their embrace. . .

Music, too, keeps building anew with the insecurest

stones her celestial house in unusable space.

XI

Many a rule of death rose with deliberate rightness,

onwardly-conquering man, during your hunting past:

better than trap or net known to me, fluttering whiteness,

you they were wont to hang down in the cavernous Karst.

Gently letting you in, as were you a token

publishing peace. But then: vassal would twitch at your thong,

Night would cast from the caves pallid handfuls of broken-

flighted doves to the light. . . 

                                            Not even that, though, was wrong.

Far from the gazer remain every emotion but gladness,

not from the hunter alone, gathering, watchful and keen,

that which his suns have matured.

Killing merely is one form of our wandering sadness. . .

Pure in the spirit serene

's all we ourselves have endured.

XII

Choose to be changed. With the flame, with the flame be

enraptured,

where from within you a thing changefully-splendid escapes:

nothing whereby that earth-mastering artist is captured

more than the turning-point touched by his soaring shapes.

That which would stay what it is renounced existence:

does it feel safe in its shelter of lustreless grey?

Wait, a hardest is warning the hard from a distance,

heaved is a hammer from far away.

He who pours forth like a spring shall be known of his Knowing;

ravished, it leads him through cheerful creation, that closes

often as not with beginning and opens with end.

Parting's child or descendent is each glad space they are going

gazingly through. And now, feeling her metamorphosis,

laurelled Daphne wants you, changed to a wind, for her friend.

XIII

Anticipate all farewells, as were they behind you

now, like the winter going past.

For through some winter you feel such wintriness bind you,

your then out-wintering heart will always outlast.

Dead evermore in Eurydice, mount with more singing

mount to relation more pure with more celebrant, tongue.

Here, in this realm of the dwindlers and dregs, be a ringing

glass, which has, even though shivered to pieces, been rung.

Be -- and, perceiving in that which is being's negation

merely the infinite ground of your fervent vibration,

beat, through this never-again, to the fullest amount.

To the stock of used-up, as well as of dumb and decaying

things within copious Nature, those sums beyond saying,

count yourself joyfully in and destroy the account.

XIV

Flowers, so faithful to earth that has sent them hither,

whom we lend fate from the borders of fate -- and yet

who knows, when we think we see them regretfully wither,

if it is not for us to be their regrer?

To all that would soar our selves are the grand aggravation,

we lay them on all we encounter, proud of their weight;

what terrifying teachers we are for that part of creation

which loves its eternally childish state.

Could someone but take them right into his slumber and sleep

deeply with things, how differently, lightly he'd wander

back to a different day out of that communal deep.

Or, it may be, he would stay, and they'd blossom and praise

him, the converted, now one of them and all yonder

silent brothers and sisters in woodlands and ways.

XV

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, crytsal-clear;

falls to the slumbering recumbent ear,

the marble ear, with which you still 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.

XVI

Still the god remains an ever-growing

wholeness we have irritably burst.

We are sharp, for we insist on knowing,

he exists serenly 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.

XVII

Where, in what ever-blissfully watered gardens, upon what trees,

out of, oh, what gently dispetalled flower-cups do these

so strange-looking fruits of consolation mature?

Delicious, when, now and then, you pick one up in the poor

trampled field of your poverty. Time and again you find

yourself lost in wonder over the size of the fruit,

over its wholesomeness, over its smooth, soft rind,

and that neither the heedless bird above nor jealous worm at the root

has been before you. Are there, then, trees where angels will congregate,

trees invisible leisurely gardeners so curiously cultivate,

that, without being oursm they bear for us fruit like those?

Have we, then, never been able, we shadows and shades,

with our doing that ripens too early and then as suddenly fades,

to disturb that even-tempered summer's repose?

XVIII

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?

XIX

Gold dwells somewhere at ease in the pampering bank,

mixing with thousands on intimate terms. But to any

coin that blind man begging, to even a penny,

seems but a desolate place, a chink in a dusty plank.

Money shines out from the shops in its own dimension,

plausibly masking in silk, carnation, and fur.

He, though, silently stands in the breath-suspension

of all the money breathing, asleep or astir.

Oh, how does it ever close at night, that perpetually open hand?

Fate to-morrow will fetch it back and display it,

bright, poor, endlessly fragile, year after year.

Could but at last some gazer, astoundedly coming to understand,

celebrate its persistence! - Only a singer could say it.

Only a god could hear.

XX

Inter-stellar spaces -- ah yes, but how mnay times greater spaces terrestrial are!

First, for example, a child. . .  then a neighbour, a moment later, --

oh, how incredibly far!

Fate but through spanning us, maybe, with Being's measure

    seems so strange to our eyes:

think of the spans to a man from a maid, whose pleasure

lingers with him she flies!

All is remote -- nowhere does the circle close

Look at that curious face on the welcoming table,

staring out of its dish.

Fishes are dumb,. . . so one imagined. Who knows?

May there not be some place where, without them, the dwellers 

    are able

to speak what would be the language of fish?

XXI

Sing those gardens, my heart, poured as into a glass,

gardens you have not known, transparent, untrampled.

Waters and roses of Ispahan or Shiras,

blissfully sing them, praise them, the unexampled.

Show that by you, my heart, they are never missed:

pleasure for you their ripening figs are preparing,

you with their breezes, almost visibly bearing

fragrance of blossoming branches, can always tryst.

Know that no want exists for, no hand bereaving

takes from, the acted resolution: to be.

Silken thread, you have entered into the weaving.

Feel, with what pattern soever you're inwardly blended

(even a scene from the story of Agony),

feel that the whole, the praisable, carpet's intended.

XXII

Oh, but in spite of fate, life's glorious abundance

foaming over in parks and splendid estates, --

or in stone men, with all their straining redundance,

under balconies built over lofty gates.

Oh, the brazen bell that daily uplifts its solemn

hammer against the dullness of every day.

Or the one, the only, at Karnak, the column, the column,

surviving almost eternal temples' decay.

Now, though, the overflowings of that same font all

plunge but as speed from the yellow, the horizontal

day to the night so dazzlingly overwrought.

Rushing by but to vanish and leace no traces.

Lingering spirals of flight through ethereal spaces, --

not one, perhaps, is in vain. Yet as were they but thought.

XXIII

Call me to your lonely meeting-places

with the hour that always says you nay:

suppliantly near you, like dogs' faces,

time and time again, though, turned away,

when at last you think that it is yours.

Things thus snatched from you are most your own.

We are free -- dismissed from those same doors

where we thought such welcome had been shown.

Anxiously we hanker for a holdfast,

we, too youthful sometimes for the old past,

and too old for what has never been.

We, whose righteousness depends how far we

praise, for branch and axe and sweetness are we 

of a peril ripening unseen.

XXIV

Oh, delight leaping ever-new when we loosen the soil!

Hardly a hand lent the earliest darers assistance.

Towns arose none the less on gulds to a blessed existence,

pitchers were filled none the less with water and oil.

Gods, -- we plan them in bold provisional sketches

cross-grained Fate takes from us and flings to the past.

Still, they are the Immortals. Our spirit outstretches,

hearkening-out the one that will hear it at last.

We, but one race for millennia, growing ever greater,

age after age, with that child of the future whose birth

shall so entirely surpass and astonish us, later.

We, so immeasurably ventured, what aeons attend us!

And only taciturn Death knows what we are worth,

and how much it always pays him to lend us.

XXV

Hark, the earliest harrows striving

already; the rhythm of man once more

breaks the tense stillness around reviving

pre-vernal earth. What has come before

seems to return as unstaled as ever.

No new-comer, it comes like new.

Looked for again and again, you never

could capture it. Always it captured you.

Sunset splashes the wintered oaken

leaves with a brown that is yet to be.

Sometimes breezes exchange a token.

Black are the hedges. But heaps of dung

crouch more statedly black on the lea.

Hours grow more eternally young.

XXVI

How it thrills us, the bird's clear cry. . . 

Any cry that was always there.

Children, playing in the open air,

children already go crying by

real cries. Cry chance in. Through crevasses

in that same space whereinto, as dreaming

men into dreams, the pure bird-cry passes

they drive their splintering wedge of screaming.

Where are we? Freer and freer, we gyre

only half up, kites breaking

loose, with our frills of laughter flaking

away in the wind. -- Make the criers a choir,

singing god! that resurgently waking

may bear on its waters the head and the lyre.

XXVII

Does it exist, though, Time the destroyer?

When will it scatter the tower on the resting hill?

This heart, the eternal gods' eternal enjoyer,

when shall the Demiurge ravish and spill?

Are we really such tremblingly breakable

things as Destiny tries to pretend?

Does childhood's promise, deep, unmistakable,

down in the roots, then, later, end?

Ah, Mutability's spectre!

out through the simple accepter

you, like a vapour, recede.

We, though we wax but for waning,

fill none the less for remaining

powers a celestial need.

 XXVIII

Oh, come and go, you almost child, enhancing

for one brief hour the figure of the dance

to purest constellation of that dancing

where, subject as we are to change and chance,

we beat dull nature. For she only started 

hearing with all her ears at Orpheus' song.

And you still moved with motion then imparted,

and shrank a little when a tree seemed long

in treading with you the remembered pace.

You knew it still, that passage where the lyre

soundingly rose, the unimagined centre,

and practised all your steps in hope to enter

that theme again, whirling to one entire

communion with your friend both feet and face.

XXIX

Silent friend of those far from us, feeling

how your breath is still enlarging space,

fill the sombre belfry with your pealing/

What consumes you now is growing apace

stronger than the feeding strength it borrows.

Be, as Change will have you, shade or shine.

Which has grieved you most of all your sorrows?

Turn, if drinking's bitter, into wine.

Be, in this immeasurable night,

at your senses' cross-ways magic cunning,

be the sense of their mysterious tryst.

And, should earthliness forget you quite,

murmur to the quiet earth: I'm running.

Tell the running water: I exist.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by J. B. Leishman)

Sonnets to Orpheus: First Part

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)

rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law

"But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages."

-- Albert Einstein