1977 Version of the Third Elegy

THE THIRD ELEGY (1977)

1 IT’S one thing to sing the woman one loves. Something else, alas,

2 to sing that concealed, guilty river-god of the blood.

3 He whom she knows at a distance, her youth, what does he know

4 himself of the master of lust, who out of the lonely man often

5 (before the girl ever soothed, often also as if she didn’t exist)

6 ah, dripping with what incognizable things,

7 uplifted his godly head, stirring up the night to endless uproar?

8 Oh the blood’s Neptune, oh his fearsome trident!

9 Oh the deep-sounding wind of his breast from a spiraling conch!

10 Hear how the night grows concave and hollow! You stars,

11 does it not derive from you, the lover’s lust for the visage

12 of his beloved? Does he not receive his fervent insight

13 into her pure face from a pure constellation?

14 It was not you, alas, nor his mother,

15 who tautened the arch of his brows to such expectation.

16 It was not on you, girl feeling him, not on you

17 that his lip was bent to this fruitful expression.

18 Do you really believe that your lilting arrival has

19 shaken him thus, you who walk like wind at daybreak?

20 It is true you startled his heart; but elder awe

21 plunged inside him at the impulse of touching.

22 Call him ... you will not call him wholly away from sinister companionship.

23 Of course he is willing, he springs forth; relieved, he accustoms

24 himself into your secret heart and takes and begins himself.

25 But did he ever begin himself?

26 Mother, you made him small, it was you who began him;

27 to you he was new, you leaned over the newborn

28 eyes the friendly world and warded off the strange one.

29 Where, alas, are gone the years when you simply

30 with your willowy figure blocked off from him surging chaos?

31 Much you concealed from him thus; his nightly suspicious room

32 you made harmless, drawing from your heart full of refuge

33 you mingled more human space with the space of his night.

34 Not into darkness, no, into your nearer existence

35 you placed the night-light and it shone as if out of friendship.

36 Nowhere a creaking you didn’t explain, smiling,

37 as if you’d long known when the hallway behaves .. .

38 And he listened and soothed himself. Such was the might of

39 your tenderly arising: behind the wardrobe retreated,

40 tall in an overcoat, his destiny, and into the folds of the curtain

41 slipped, slightly putting itself aside, his unquiet future.

42 And he himself, as he lay relieved under

43 lulling eyelids of your gentle arranging,

44 dissolving sweetness into tasted initial sleep —:

45 he seemed protected ... But inside: who warded off,

46 hindered inside him the rising tides of his origin?

47 Ah, there was no caution inside the sleeper; sleeping

48 yet dreaming, yet in fevers: how in-volved he became.

49 He, the novice and shy one, how entangled he was

50 with inner occurrence’s further unfolding vines

51 already entwined in patterns, in strangling excrescence, in animally

52 hunting shapes. How he gave himself up —. Loved.

53 Loved his internality, his internality’s wilderness,

54 this aboriginal forest inside him, on whose mute toppledness

55 his heart stood, luminous green. Loved. Left it, went

56 down his own roots to powerful origin,

57 where his tiny birth was already outlived. Loving,

58 he descended down to his elder blood, into the gorges

59 where terror was lying, glutted still with his ancestors. And every

60 awesomeness knew him, winked as if informed.

61 Yes, the terrible smiled . . . Seldom

62 have you smiled so tenderly, mother. How should

63 he not love it, since it smiled at him? Before you

64 he loved it, for already when you were carrying him,

65 it was dissolved in the water that makes the germinating one buoyant.

66 You see, we don’t love like the flowers from a

67 single year; there rises, when we love,

68 immemorial sap into our arms. Oh girl,

69 it is this: that we love in ourselves, not one thing of the future,

70 but countless fermentation; not an individual child,

71 but the forefathers who, like the rubble of mountain ranges,

72 repose in our foundations; but the dry river-bed

73 of past mothers —; but the entire

74 soundless landscape under cloudy or

75 clear fatality —: this came before you, girl.

76 And you yourself, what do you know —, you lured

77 up primordial times within your lover. What feelings

78 burrowed up from beings transmuted and far. What

79 women hated you then. What sinister men

80 did you stir up in the veins of the youth? Dead

81 children wanted to find you . . . Oh softly, softly,

82 perform for him a loving dependable daily task, — lead him

83 near to the garden, give him the nights'

84 preponderance……..

85 Preserve him….