Die Siebente Elegie

THE SIXTH ELEGY

VI 1 Fig tree, how long has it to me been significant,

VI 2 how you almost entirely bypass the blossom

VI 3 and into the precociously unfolded fruit,

VI 4 without celebration, you press your inviolate mystery.

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

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

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

VI 8 Behold: like the god into the swan.

VI 9 We, however, tarry,

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

VI 11 of our eventual fruit we enter betrayed.

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

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

VI 14 when the inducement to blossom, like night air made mild,

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

VI 16 heroes perhaps and those destined to pass away early,

VI 17 whose veins are unusually bent by the Gardener Death.

VI 18 They plunge forth: they precede their own smiles,

VI 19 as the team of horses in the mild

VI 20 concave pictures at Karnak the conquering king.

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

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

VI 23 bears himself hence and steps into the changed constellation

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

VI 25 so balefully silent toward us, destiny, with sudden enthusiasm,

VI 26 sings him into the storm of his uprushing world.

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

VI 28 with the streaming air, his overshadowing tone.

VI 29 Then how gladly I’d hide from my longing: oh if I wer

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

VI 31 braced upon future arms and reading of Samson,

VI 32 how his mother gave birth at first to no thing, then all things.

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

VI 34 already begin there his sovereign selection?

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

VI 36 but behold: he seized and left out —, chose and succeeded.

VI 37 And if he crushed pillars, then when he burst out

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

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

VI 40 of sweeping streams! You chasms where,

VI 41 from the lofty brink of the heart, lamenting,

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

VI 43 For when the hero stormed through sojourns of love,

VI 44 every heartbeat intending him lifted him hence,

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

Click here to go to the 2007 English Target Text of the Seventh Elegy