The Second Elegy 2007

THE SECOND ELEGY (2007)

II 1 Every angel is awesome. And still, alas for me,

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

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

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

II 5 somewhat disguised for the journey and already no longer fearsome

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

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

II 8 a single stride downward and nearer: in an exalted

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

II 10 Early successes, you pampered children of the creation,

II 11 mountain ranges, dawn-reddish ridges

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

II 13 joints of light, passages, stairways, thrones,

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

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

II 16 mirrors: that rechannel your emanated own beauty

II 17 back into your own visages.

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

II 19 breathe ourselves out and afar: from ember to ember

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

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

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

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

II 24 oh, who shall hold them back? Unceasingly, semblance arises

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

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

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

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

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

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

II 31 really only their own which has emanated from them,

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

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

II 34 traits only as much as vagueness into the faces

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

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

II 37 Lovers could, if they understood, in the night air,

II 38 speak wondrously. For it seems that all things

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

II 40 that we inhabit still withstand. We alone

II 41 move past all things like an airy exchange.

II 42 And all things are agreed upon silence toward us, half as

II 43 disgrace perhaps and half as ineffable hope.

II 44 Lovers, you, satisfied within each other,

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

II 46 See how it happens to me that my hands

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

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

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

II 50 But you, who in each other’s ecstasy

II 51 increase till, overpowering each other,

II 52 you plead no more--; you who beneath your hands

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

II 54 you who sometimes succumb, for your partners

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

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

II 57 because the place does not fade that you tenderly

II 58 cover; because beneath it you sense pure

II 59 duration. Thus you promise yourselves eternity — almost —

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

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

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

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

II 64 up to your mouths and commence —: beverage to beverage:

II 65 oh how the drinkers oddly elude their own action.

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

II 67 of human gesture? Were not love and farewell

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

II 69 material than with us? Reminisce the hands,

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

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

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

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

II 74 If only we also might find a pure, diffident, narrow

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

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

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

II 78 into pictures that palliate it, nor into

II 79 godly bodies in which it more grandly restrains itself.

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

Click here to go to German Source Text of the Third Elegy

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