1977 Version of the Fourth Elegy

THE FOURTH ELEGY (1977)

1 Oh trees of life, oh when wintry?

2 We are not unified. Are not informed

3 as migrant birds are. Out of date and tardy,

4 we press ourselves all at once on winds

5 and swoop down upon an unresponding pond.

6 Of blooming and of wilting we are conscious both at once.

7 And somewhere lions walk and know,

8 as long as they are glorious, no helplessness.

9 But we, just when we wholly mean one thing,

10 already feel another’s expenditure. Hostility

11 is for us the nearest thing. Do not lovers meet

12 incessantly with borders — one within the other, —

13 who promised themselves open country, hunt, and homeland?

14 To make the sketch of a moment such that we can see it,

15 a background of the opposite is prepared

16 arduously; for we are treated so

17 explicitly. We do not know the contour

18 of feelings: only that which forms it from outside.

19 Who has not sat timidly before his own heart^’s curtain?

20 It rose: the scenery was farewell.

21 Easy to understand. The familiar garden,

22 and swayed softly: only then the dancer entered.

23 Not that one! Enough! And even if he acts so gracefully,

24 he is disguised and he becomes bourgeois

25 and walks through his kitchen into the apartment.

26 I don’t want these half-filled masks,

27 but rather the puppet. It is full. I will

28 endure the shell and the wire and its

29 face made of appearance. Here. I’m out in front.

30 Even if the lamps go out, even if I’m

31 told: “No more —“, even if from off the stage

32 emptiness comes drifting in the grey air current,

33 even if none of my still ancestors

34 will sit there with me any longer, no woman, not even

35 the boy with the squinting brown eye:

36 I shall nonetheless remain. There is always spectating.

37 Am I not right? You who around me tasted

38 life so bitter, sampling mine, Father,

39 the first clouded brew of my necessity,

40 as I grew older, you kept sampling

41 and, preoccupied with the aftertaste of so strange a future,

42 you examined my befogged upward gaze, —

43 you, my father, who since your death are often

44 beset by fear inside me, in my hope,

45 and you abandon your indifference, such as dead men have,

46 kingdoms of indifference for my bit of destiny,

47 am I not right? And you, am I not right,

48 you who loved me for the small beginning

49 of my love for you, from which I always was diverted,

50 because for me, the space within your countenance,

51 when I loved it, passed over into space of the world

52 where you no longer were ...: if I am inclined

53 to wait before the puppet stage, no,

54 to gaze at it so fully that, to finally

55 balance out my gazing, as a performer there

56 an angel must come down who jerks up the shells.

57 Angel and puppet: then finally there’s a drama.

58 Then shall be united what we incessantly

59 divide while we exist. Then shall arise

60 out of our seasons, not before, the extension

61 of entire change. Upwards over us

62 shall then perform the angel. See the dying,

63 should they not surmise how full of pretext

64 are all the things we here achieve? All things

65 are not themselves. Oh hours in our childhood,

66 when behind the figures there was more than just

67 the past and in front of us no future.

68 We grew of course and pressed on sometimes

69 to soon become adults, half for the sake of those

70 who’d nothing but adulthood left.

71 And yet upon our solitary course

72 we were amused with lasting things and stood there

73 in the interval between world and toy,

74 at a place that from the outset

75 was founded for a pure occurrence.

76 Who shall reveal a child as it stands? Who shall place

77 it in the constellation and put the measure of detachment

78 in its hand? Who shall make the child’s death

79 of dark bread that grows hard, — or shall leave

80 its death inside the round mouth, like the core

81 of a lovely apple? …Murderers

82 are easy to realize. But this: containing death,

83 entire death, even before life, so gently, and not being angry,

84 is indescribable.