1977 Version of the Second Elegy

THE SECOND ELEGY (1977)

1 EVERY angel is awesome. And still, alas for me,

2 I besing you, all but deadly birds of the soul,

3 knowing your nature. Where are the days of Tobias gone,

4 when one of these most radiant beings stood at the simple house door,

5 somewhat disguised for the journey and already no longer fearsome

6 (as a youth to the youth who curiously peered out)?

7 Should the archangel now, the perilous one, step from behind the stars

8 a single stride downward and nearer: in a high-upward

9 beating, our own heart would beat us to death. Who are you?

10 Early successes, you spoiled children of the creation,

11 mountain ranges, dawn-reddish ridges

12 of all things created, — pollen of blossoming godhead,

13 angles of light, passages, stairways, thrones,

14 spaces made of essence, shields made of rapture, tumults

15 of stormily ecstatic feeling and all of a sudden, individually,

16 mirrors: that rechannel your emanated own beauty

17 back into your own visages.

18 For we, when we feel, dissipate: ah, we

19 breathe ourselves out and afar: from ember to ember

20 we give a weaker aroma. Then someone might say to us:

21 yes, you get into my blood, this room, the springtime

22 is filled with you ... What’s the use, he cannot hold us,

23 we fade within and around him. And those who are beauteous,

24 oh who shall hold them back? Unceasingly, appearance arises

25 within their face and departs. Like dew on the grass at daybreak

26 that which we are drifts from us, like the heat from a

27 hot dish of food. Oh smile, whither? Oh uplifted gaze:

28 new, warm, eluding wave of the heart —;

29 alas for me, it is us! Does the space of the world

30 in which we dissolve taste like us? Do the angels intercept

31 really only their own which has emanated from them,

32 or is there sometimes, as if by an oversight,

33 a little of our essence included? Are we mingled into their

34 traits only as much as vagueness into the faces

35 of pregnant women? They do not notice it amid the whirlwind

36 of return to themselves. (How should they notice it?)

37 Lovers could, if they understood it, speak wondrously

38 in the night air. For it seems that all things

39 keep us secret. Behold, the trees exist: the houses

40 that we inhabit still withstand. We alone

41 move past all things like an airy exchange.

42 And all things are agreed to keep silent about us, half as

43 a disgrace perhaps and half as an inexpressible hope.

44 Lovers, it is you, satisfied within each other,

45 that I ask about us. You grasp each other. Do you have proofs?

46 See how it happens to me that my hands

47 grow aware of each other or that my used-up

48 face conserves itself in them. That gives me a bit of

49 sensibility. Yet who would dare to exist just for that?

50 But you, who in each other’s ecstasy

51 increase till you plead to each other,

52 overpowered: no more--; you who beneath your hands

53 become to each other more abundant than years of grapes;

54 you who sometimes succumb, only because your partners

55 become overwhelming: it is you that I ask about us. I know,

56 you touch each other so blissfully because the caress preserves,

57 because the place does not fade that you tenderly

58 cover; because beneath it you sense unbroken

59 duration. Thus you promise yourselves eternity — almost —

60 from your embrace. And yet. when you’ve withstood

61 the awe of first gazes, the longing at the window,

62 and the first walk together, one time through the garden:

63 lovers, is it still you then? When you raise each other

64 up to your mouths and begin —: beverage to beverage:

65 oh how the drinkers oddly elude their own action.

66 Were you not astonished (on Attic steles) at the cautiousness

67 of human gesture? Were not love and farewell

68 so lightly laid on their shoulders as if it were made of other

69 material than with us? Remember the hands,

70 how they repose without pressure, although the strength stands in the torsos.

71 They were restrained and knew thereby: it is us thus far,

72 this is ours, to touch each other this way; stronger

73 is the force the gods exert on us. But that’s the concern of the gods.

74 If only we also might find a pure, preserved, narrow

75 realm of the human, our own strip of fruitful land

76 between stream and stone. For our own heart transcends us

77 still, just like them. And we can no longer gaze after it

78 into pictures that palliate it, nor into

79 godly bodies in which it more grandly restrains itself.