1977 Version of the Sixth Elegy

THE SIXTH ELEGY (1977)

1 FIG TREE, how long has it seemed to me meaningful,

2 the way you almost entirely bypass the blossom

3 and into the precociously unfolded fruit,

4 without celebration, you press your inviolate mystery.

5 Like the the fountain’s pipe, your angular branches drive

6 the sap downward and onward: and it springs out of sleep,

7 almost not wakened, into the joy of its sweetest achievement.

8 Behold: like the god into the swan.

9 We, however, tarry,

10 ah, we celebrate blossoming, and into the retarded interior

11 of our eventual fruit, we enter betrayed.

12 Into but few of us rises so strongly the impulse of action

13 that they at once stand ready and glow in the fullness of heart,

14 when the incitement to blossom, like night air made mild,

15 touches the youth of their mouths or touches their eyelids:

16 heroes perhaps and those destined to pass away early,

17 whose veins are bent in unusual ways by the Gardener Death.

18 They plunge hence: they precede their own smiles,

19 as the team of horses in the mild

20 concave pictures at Karnak precedes the conquering king.

21 Wondrously near is the hero to those who died youthful. Duration

22 does not oppose him. His ascension is existence; he unswervingly

23 bears himself hence and steps into the changed constellation

24 of his perpetual jeopardy. Few could discover him there. But,

25 so balefully silent regarding us, destiny, with sudden enthusiasm,

26 sings him into the storm of his soaringly rushing world.

27 I hear no other like him. All at once there pervades me,

28 with the streaming air, his obscured tone.

29 Then how gladly I’d hide from my longing: oh if I were,

30 if I were a boy and might yet be the hero and were sitting

31 supported by future arms and reading of Samson,

32 how his mother gave birth at first to nothing, then all things.

33 Was he not already a hero inside you, mother, didn’t

34 his sovereign selection already begin there within you?

35 Thousands were germinating inside the womb and wanting to be him,

36 but behold: he seized and omitted —, chose and succeeded.

37 And if he crushed pillars, it was then when he burst out

38 from the world of your body into the narrower world, where he further

39 chose and succeeded. Oh mothers of heroes, oh source

40 of sweeping streams! You chasms where,

41 from the high-up brink of the heart, lamenting,

42 the girls already plunged, the victims-to-be of your sons.

43 For when the hero stormed through sojourns of love,

44 every heartbeat intending him lifted him hence,

45 already turned away, he stood at the end of the smiles, — not the same.