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Elegy
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THE TENTH ELEGY (1977)
1
Let
me one day, at the outcome of vehement
2
insight, sing rejoicing and celebration up to concurring angels.
3
Of
the clear-beaten hammers of the heart, let
4
none falter on slack, doubting, or
5
breaking strings. Let my streaming visage
6
make me more lustrous: let unpretentious weeping
7
bloom.
0 how you will then be dear to me, nights
8
afflicted!
Oh that I didn’t accept you more kneelingly, disconsolate
9
sisters,
that to your freely flowing
10
hair
I didn’t surrender more freely!
11
We, squanderers of pain. How we foresee it into joyless duration,
12
whether perhaps it will end. Yet it is really
13
our winter-long foliage, our somber myrtle,
14
one
of
the seasons of the secret year —, not just
15 time —, it is location, settlement, resting place, soil, residence.
16
Alas,
how undeniably strange are the lanes of the City of Sufferance,
17
where
in the false stillness made of overwhelmed
18
sound, strongly, out of the mold of emptiness, the molding
19
boasts: the gold-plated noise, the bursting monument.
20
Oh, how totally an
angel would stamp out their market place of consolement
21
that borders the church they bought ready-made:
22
tidy and closed and disappointed like a post-office on Sunday.
23
Outside, however, the carnival’s edges are always ruffling.
24
Seesaws of freedom! Divers and magicians of zeal!
25
And
prettified happiness’s figurative shooting-gallery
26
that twitches with targets and behaves tinnily
27
when a man with more skill makes a hit. From applause to chance
laws
28
he staggers onward; while booths of each curiosity
29
advertise, beat
the drum, and rant. For adults however,
30
watched separately: how money procreates anatomically,
31
not just an amusement: the genital organs of money,
32
all that, the whole, the process —, that instructs and makes
33
fruitful…....
34
but right beyond this,
35
beyond the last plank pasted up with posters for “Deathless”,
36
that bitter beer that seems sweet to the drinkers,
37
if they always chew fresh distractions with it…
38
just in back of the plank, just beyond, things are real.
39
Children
are playing, and lovers holding each other, — off to the side,
40
gravely, in the scanty grass, and dogs have nature.
41
His gaze can’t encompass it, in early death
42
still dizzy. But their gazing
41
The
youth is drawn onward; perhaps that he’s enamoured of a young
42 Lament.
Follows her off across meadows. She says:
43
“Far
away. We live out there”… “Where?” And the youth
44
follows.
He’s touched by her stature, Her shoulders, her throat, — perhaps
45
she’s of lordly descent. But he leaves her, turns
round,
46 turns back. Waves…What’s the use? She’s a Lament.
47
Only those who died young, in the first phase
48
of
timeless indifference, of becoming unaccustomed,
49
follow her with devotion. Girls
50
she
waits for and befriends them. Shows them quietly
51
what she is wearing. Pearls of sufferance and the finespun
52
veils of passivity. — With youths she walks
53 in silence.
54
But
there where they live in the valley, one of the elder
55
Laments
takes charge of the youth when he asks. “We were”,
56
she
says, “a Great race once, we Laments. Our forefathers
57
worked the mines there in the great mountain range; among humans
58
you find sometimes a fragment of polished aboriginal sufferance,
59
or, from an old volcano, cindery petrified wrath.
60 Yes, that came from there. Long ago we were wealthy.”
61
And
she guides him lightly through the wide landscape of the Laments,
62
shows him the columns of temples or the ruins
63
of those castles from whence the Princes of the Laments
64
long ago ruled the land wisely. Shows him the tall
65
tear-trees and the fields of blossoming melancholy
66
(the living know them only as gentle carven leaves):
67
shows him the animals of sorrow, grazing, — and sometimes
68
a bird starts up and draws, horizontally through their uplifted gaze,
69
far
and wide the inscribed sign of its cry grown lonesome. —
70
In the evening she leads him
off to the graves of the ancestors
71
of the race of Laments, the Sibyls and Warning Lords.
72
Yet as night draws nigh, they
walk on more quietly, and soon
73
it moons upward, the all‑
74
watching grave-marker. Brother to that on the Nile,
75
the sublime Sphinx —: the reticent chamber’s visage.
76
And they marvel at the
crownable head that, for all time,
77
silently placed the face of humanity
78
on the scales of the stars.
79
His gaze can’t encompass it, in early death,
80
Still dizzy . But their gazing
81
from
behind the Pshent-crown’s rim startles the owl. And it,
82
skimming in a slow stroke along the cheek,
83
that of the most mature roundedness,
84
designs lithely upon the newly
85
deceased’s hearing, across a page
86 opened double, the indescribable outline.
87
And higher, the stars. New ones. The stars of the
88
Slowly, the Lament recites their names: "Here,
89
look: the Rider,
the
Staff and the more full
constellation
90
they call Wreath
of Fruit. Then, onward, nearer the pole:
91
Cradle;
Pathway; The Burning Book; Puppet; Window.
92
But in the southern sky, pure as the palm
93
of a blessed hand, the lucidly lustrous ‘M’
94 that stands for the Mothers…—
95
But the deceased must depart, and silently the elder
96
Lament brings him as far as the valley’s chasm,
97
where there shimmers in moonlight:
98
the Spring of Joy. With reverence
98
she utters its name, says:
‘Among humans
100 it is a sustaining river.’
101
They stand at the foot of the mountain range.
102 And there she embraces him, weeping.
103
Alone, he ascends off into the Mountains of Aboriginal Sufferance.
104 And not even his step resounds off the toneless fate.
105
But should they awaken for us, the endlessly dead, a parable,
106
you see, they would point perhaps to the aments of the bare
107
hazel tree hanging down, or
108 indicate rain that falls on the dark realm of earth in the spring. —
109
And we, who conceive of
rising happiness,
110
would be touched in a way
111
that almost confounds us
112 when a happy thing falls.