1977 Version of the Eighth Elegy

THE EIGHTH ELEGY (1977)

dedicated to Rudolf Kassner

1 With all their eyes, living creatures see

2 the open world. Only our eyes are

3 as if reversed and placed all round ourselves

4 like traps around our free emergence.

5 What exists outside we know only from the animal’s visage:

6 for already, the early child

7 we reverse and force it to see arrangement

8 backwards, not the open world that

9 is so deeply set in the animal face. Free of death,

10 which only we can see. The untrammeled animal

11 has its destruction constantly behind it

12 and God in front, and when it walks, it walks

13 in eternity, the way the fountains flow.

14 We never, not a single day, have

15 open space before us into which the flowers

16 endlessly unfold. Always it is “world”

17 and never “nowhere” without “not”: the pure,

18 the unobserved that one breathes and

19 endlessly knows and does not crave. A child

20 might quietly get lost in it and then be

21 shaken. Or someone dies and is it.

22 For near to death, one sees death no longer

23 and stares outside, perhaps with the huge gaze of animals.

24 Lovers. if their partners were not there who

25 obstruct the view, are near to this and marvel…

26 As if by oversight, it’s shown to them

27 what’s behind the partner…But beyond

28 him none can pass, and again one has “world.”

29 Turned toward creation always, we only see

30 upon it the reflection of the untrammeled,

31 obscured by us. Or that an animal,

32 a mute one, looks calmly up, right through us.

33 This is called destiny: to be a counterpart

34 and nothing else and always opposite.

35 Were there awareness of our species in the

36 assured animal that comes toward us

37 in the opposite direction —, it would wrench us round

38 with its course. But for it, its own existence is

39 endless, ungrasped, and without regard

40 for its condition, pure, like its outgoing gaze.

41 And where we see future, it sees all things there

42 and itself within all things and healed forever.

43 And yet inside the watchfully warm animal there is

44 weight and anxiousness of massive melancholy.

45 For there adheres to it always a trace of that which

46 often overwhelms us, — remembrance,

47 as if the things for which one presses on had once

48 been nearer and their acquisition

49 endlessly tender. Here, all is detachment

50 and there it had been breath. After the first homeland,

51 the second seems equivocal and windy to the animal.

52 Oh the bliss of the tiny creature

53 that always stays inside the womb that bore it;

54 oh happiness of the gnat that still hops in it

55 even during matrimony: for womb is everything.

56 And see the semi-sureness of the bird

57 who almost knows both things from its origin,

58 as if it were a soul of some Etruscan

59 of a deceased encompassed by a space,

60 but with the sleeping effigy as lid.

61 And how alarmed is one that has to fly

62 and is derived from womb. As if startled by itself,

63 it quivers through the air the way a crack

64 would cross a cup. Thus the bat’s trail

65 rends the porcelain of evening.

66 And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

67 turned toward all this and never out beyond it!

68 It overfills us. We arrange it. It collapses.

69 We again arrange it and collapse ourselves.

70 Who is it that reversed us thus, that we,

71 whatever we may do, present the aspect

72 of someone who’s departing? Just as he, upon

73 the final hill that reveals to him once more all

74 his valley, turns round, stops, and lingers —,

75 thus we live and take our leave forever.