Indeed they’d come, only they were two
of terribly light going. Were he allowed
but once to turn (was not the looking back sure
dissolution of this entire labour,
now only being completed) he must see them,
the two soft-treading, who silently follow him:
the god of journeys and of far embassy,
with travelling cap over fair eyes,
carrying the slender rod before his body
and with wings fluttering at his ankles;
and given to his left hand – she.
She who was so much loved, that from a lyre
more lament came than from lamenting women:
and from lament a world was born, in which
all was recreated: wood and valley,
road, habitation, field and river and beast;
so that around this world of lament, just as
around the other earth a sun
and a star-set silent heaven went,
a heaven lamenting with distorted stars:
this one who was so much loved.
And still she walked, leaning on that god’s hand,
her step narrowed by the long winding sheet,
uncertain, mild and without impatience.
She was closed in herself, like one with child,
and thought not of the man who went before her,
nor of the road, which climbed up into life.
She was shut in herself. Her being dead
filled her like fullness.
Like a fruit with sweetness and the dark
so was she full with her great death,
which still remained so new, that she grasped nothing.
She was in a new maidenhood, and
untouchable; her sex was closed
like a young flower towards the evening
and now her hands to marriage were
so much estranged, that even the light god’s
endlessly gentle guiding touch
offended her like a too great intimacy.
She had already ceased to be that woman,
the blonde who echoed through the poet’s songs,
no more was she the great bed’s scent and island
and that man’s property no more.
She was already loosened like long hair,
abandoned like the fallen rain
and portioned out like hundredfold provision.
She was already root
when precipitately
the god did stop her and with pain in his call
the words spoke: ‘He has turned’ –
she grasped nothing and whispered softly: ‘Who?’
But far off, dark before the light way out,
someone stood, whose countenance
could not be recognized. He stood and saw
how along the strip of meadow path
with mournful glance the god of embassy
silently turned, following the figure
already walking back on this same road,
her step narrowed by the long winding sheet,
uncertain, mild and without impatience.
[1934]
from The Duino Elegies: The First Elegy
(after Rilke)
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his
stronger existence. For Beauty’s nothing
but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because it serenely
disdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible.
And so I keep down my heart, and swallow the call-note
of depth-dark sobbing. Alas, who is there
we can make use of? Not angels, not men;
and already the knowing brutes are aware
that we don’t feel very securely at home
within our interpreted world. There remains, perhaps,
some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day,
there remains for us yesterday’s walk and the cupboard-love loyalty
of a habit that liked us and stayed and never gave notice.
Oh, and there’s Night, there’s Night, when wind full of cosmic space
feeds on our faces: for whom would she not remain,
longed for, mild disenchantress, painfully there
for the lonely heart to achieve? Is she lighter for lovers?
Alas, with each other they only conceal their lot!
Don’t you know yet? – Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe – maybe that the birds
will feel the extended air in more intimate flight.
Yes, the Springs had need of you. Many a star
was waiting for you to espy it. Many a wave
would rise in the past towards you; or else, perhaps,
as you went by an open window, a violin
would be giving itself to someone. All this was a trust.
But were you equal to it? Were you not always
distracted by expectation, as though all this
were announcing someone to love? (As if you could hope
to conceal her, with all those great strange thoughts going in
and out and often staying overnight!)
No, when longing comes over you, sing the great lovers: the fame
of all they can feel is far from immortal enough.
Those whom you almost envy, those forsaken, you found
so far beyond the requited in loving. Begin
ever anew their never-attainable praise.
Consider: the Hero continues, even his setting
was a pretext for further existence, an ultimate birth.
But lovers are taken back by exhausted Nature
into herself, as though such creative force
could never be re-exerted. Have you so fully remembranced
Gaspara Stampa, that any girl, whose beloved’s
eluded her, may feel, from that far intenser
example of loving: ‘if I could become like her!’?
Ought not these oldest sufferings of ours to be yielding
more fruit by now? Is it not time that, in loving,
we freed ourselves from the loved one, and, quivering, endured:
as the arrow endures the string, to become, in the gathering out-leap,
something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.
Voices, voices. Hear, O my heart, as only
saints have heard: heard till the giant-call
lifted them off the ground; yet they went impossibly
on with their kneeling, in undistracted attention:
so inherently hearers. Not that you could endure
the voice of God – far from it. But hark to the suspiration,
the uninterrupted news that grows out of silence.
Rustling towards you now from those youthfully-dead.
Whenever you entered a church in Rome or in Naples
were you not always being quietly addressed by their fate?
Or else an inscription sublimely imposed itself on you,
as, lately, the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.
What they require of me? I must gently remove the appearance
of suffered injustice, that hinders
a little, at times, their purely-proceeding spirits.
True, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to use no longer customs scarcely acquired,
not to interpret roses, and other things
that promise so much, in terms of a human future;
to be no longer all that one used to be
in endlessly anxious hands, and to lay aside
even one’s proper name like a broken toy.
Strange, not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange,
to see all that was once relation so lo
osely fluttering
hither and thither in space. And it’s hard, being dead,
and full of retrieving before one begins to espy
a trace of eternity. – Yes, but all of the living
make the mistake of drawing too sharp distinctions.
Angels (they say) are often unable to tell
whether they move among living or dead. The eternal
torrent whirls all the ages through either realm
for ever, and sounds above their voices in both.
They’ve finally no more need of us, the early-departed,
one’s gently weaned from terrestrial things as one mildly
outgrows the breasts of a mother. But we, that have need of
such mighty secrets, we, for whom sorrow’s so often
source of blessedest progress, could we exist without them?
Is the story in vain, how once, in the mourning for Linos,
venturing earliest music pierced barren numbness, and how,
in the horrified space an almost deified youth
suddenly quitted for ever, emptiness first
felt the vibration that now charms us and comforts and helps?
from The Duino Elegies: The Fifth Elegy
Dedicated to Frau Hertha Koenig
(after Rilke)
But tell me, who are they, these acrobats, even a little
more fleeting than we ourselves, – so urgently, ever since childhood,
wrung by an (oh, for the sake of whom?)
never-contented will? That keeps on wringing them,
bending them, slinging them, swinging them,
throwing them and catching them back: as though from an oily,
smoother air, they come down on the threadbare
carpet, thinned by their everlasting
upspringing, this carpet forlornly
lost in the cosmos.
Laid on there like a plaster, as though the suburban
sky had injured the earth.
And hardly there,
upright, shown there: the great initial
letter of Thereness, – than even the strongest
men are rolled once more, in sport, by the everreturning
grasp, as once by Augustus the Strong
a tin platter at table.
Alas, and round this
centre the rose of onlooking
blooms and unblossoms. Round this
pestle, this pistil, caught by its own
dust-pollen, and fertilized over again
to a sham-fruit of boredom, their own
never-realized boredom, gleaming with thinnest
lightly sham-smiling surface.
There, the withered wrinkled lifter,
old now and only drumming,
shrivelled up in his mighty skin as though it had once contained
two men, and one were already
lying in the churchyard, and he had outlasted the other,
deaf and sometimes a little
strange in his widowed skin.
And the youngster, the man, like the son of a neck
and a nun: so tautly and smartly filled
with muscle and simpleness.
O you,
a pain that was still quite small
received as a plaything once in one of its
long convalescences …
You, that fall with the thud
only fruits know, unripe,
daily a hundred times from the tree
of mutually built up motion (the tree that, swifter than water,
has spring and summer and autumn in so many minutes),
fall and rebound on the grave:
sometimes, in half-pauses, a tenderness tries
to steal out over your face to your seldomly
tender mother, but scatters over your body,
whose surface quickly absorbs the timidly rippling,
hardly attempted look … And again
that man is clapping his hands for the downward spring, and before
a single pain has got within range of your ever-
galloping heart, comes the tingling
in the soles of your feet, ahead of the spring that it springs from,
chasing into your eyes a few physical tears.
And, spite of all, blindly,
your smile …
Angel! oh, take it, pluck it, that small-flowered herb of healing!
Shape a vase to preserve it. Set it among those joys
not yet open to us: in a graceful urn
praise it, with florally soaring inscription:
‘Subrisio Saltat.’
Then you, my darling,
mutely elided
by all the most exquisite joys. Perhaps
your frills are happy on your behalf, –
or over your tight young breasts
the green metallic silk
feels itself endlessly spoilt and in need of nothing.
You,
time after time, upon all of the quivering scale-pans of balance
freshly laid fruit of serenity,
publicly shown among shoulders.
Where, oh, where in the world is that place in my heart
where they still were far from being able, still fell away
from each other like mounting animals, not yet
properly paired; –
where weights are still heavy,
and hoops still stagger
away from their vainly
twirling sticks? …
And then, in this wearisome nowhere, all of a sudden,
the ineffable spot where the pure too-little
incomprehensibly changes, springs round
into that empty too-much?
Where the many-digited sum
solves into zero?
Squares, O square in Paris, infinite show-place,
where the modiste Madame Lamort
winds and binds the restless ways of the world,
those endless ribbons, to ever-new
creations of bow, frill, flower, cockade and fruit,
all falsely coloured, to deck
the cheap winter-hats of Fate.
*
Angel: suppose there’s a place we know nothing about, and there,
on some indescribable carpet, lovers showed all that here
they’re for ever unable to manage – their daring
lofty figures of heart-flight,
their towers of pleasure, their ladders,
long since, where ground never was, just quiveringly
propped by each other, – suppose they could manage it there,
before the spectators ringed round, the countless un-murmuring dead:
would not the dead then fling their last, their for ever reserved,
ever-concealed, unknown to us, ever-valid
coins of happiness down before the at last
truthfully smiling pair on the quietened
carpet?
Paris
(from the French of Louis Aragon)
Where there is good in the storm’s heart of rage
Where in the heart of the night it is fair
The air is alcohol and misfortune courage
Windowframes broken hope still glimmers there
And from ruined walls the songs climb the air.
Never extinguished reborn from its blaze
Eternal glow of our motherland this
From Point du Jour until Père Lachaise
In August most sweet reflorescent of rose trees
Folk of everywhere the blood of Paris.
There’s no éclat like Paris this dust under
Nothing so pure as her brow’s resurgent wave
Nothing is so strong not fire nor thunder
As my Paris her dangers defiant to outbrave
Nothing so lovely as this Paris I have.
Nothing before made my heart to beat thus
Nothing my laughter with my tears so mated
As this cry of my people victorious
Nothing is so vast as a shroud torn and shed
Paris, Paris, of herself liberated.
[1944]
Ballad of the Exterior Life
(from the German of Hugo Von Hofmannsthal)
And children grow up with their deep-eyed gaze
Who know of nothing, they grow up and die,
And all mankind continue on their ways.
And from the bitter the sweet fruits grow high
And in the night they fall down like dead birds
And lie there a few days and putrefy.
And the wind ever blows and many words
Are said by us, who learn ever anew,
And we taste joy and limbs becoming tired.
And streets run through the grass and places show
Here and there, with torches, a pond, trees,
And menacing, and deathly-withered too …
Wherefore were they built up? And why are these
Never alike? And are too many to name?
What takes the place of laughter, tears, disease?
What use all this to us, and all this game
Of growing old and ever being alone
And wandering never seeking any aim?
What use of such things to have seen so many?
Yet much is said by him who ‘evening’ says
A word from which deep meaning and grief run
As from the hollow comb the heavy honey.
[1951]
from Antigone
Happy are those who never tasted evil.
For once the house incurs the rage of heaven
The indignant curse fallen on it never ceases
But remains always, and for ever passes
From life to life through all its generations.
So from the earliest times the sorrows
Of children of the house of Labdacus
Heap on their dead new sorrows always
Never set free by later generations,
And if a son arise to free that house
A god arises soon to cast him down.
Just as when howling gales from off-shore
Pile up in mountainous waves the Thracian seas
Selected Poems of Stephen Spender Page 8
