The Fourth Elegy 2007

THE FOURTH ELEGY (2007)

1 Oh trees of life, oh when wintry?

2 We are not synchronised . Are not notified

3 as migrant birds are. Bygone and tardy,

4 we impose ourselves suddenly on winds

5 and swoop down upon an unresponding pond.

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

7 And somewhere lions stride and know,

8 whilst they are glorious, no helplessness.

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

10 already feel another’s exertion. Hostility

11 is for us the nearest. Do not lovers tread

12 incessantly on borders — one in another, —

13 who promised themselves breadth, hunt, and homeland?

14 There, for the sketch of a moment,

15 a background of opposites is created, arduously,

16 That we should see it; for we are treated so

17 definitively. We do not know the contour

18 of feelings: only what forms it from outside.

19 Who has not sat anxiously 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 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 when the lamps go out, even if I’m

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

32 the emptiness comes drifting in the grey air current,

33 even if, of my still ancestors, none

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

35 the boy with the brown squinting 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 your indifference, such as dead men have, kingdoms

46 of indifference, you abandon 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, from which I always diverted,

50 because for me, the space within your countenance,

51 when I loved it, passed over into world space

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 there’s finally drama.

58 Then shall be united what we incessantly

59 dissect whilst we exist. Only then arises

60 out of our seasons, not before, the circumference

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? Everything

65 is not itself. Oh hours in our childhood,

66 when behind the figures there was more than just

67 the past and before us no future.

68 We grew of course and pressed on sometimes

69 to soon become adult, 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.

Click here to go to 2007 English version of the Fifth Elegy

Click here to go to German Text of the Fifth Elegy

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