The Third Elegy 2007

THE THIRD ELEGY (2007)

III 1 It's one thing to sing the woman one loves. Antithetic, alas,

III 2 to sing that enshrouded, culpable river-god of the blood.

III 3 He whom she remarks from far off, her youngster, what does he know

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

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

III 6 ah, dripping with what incognisable things,

III 7 uplifted his godly head, upstirring the night to limitless uproar?

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

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

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

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

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

III 13 in her pure face from a pure constellation?

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

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

III 16 It was not on you, maid feeling him, not on you

III 17 that his lip was bent to this fruitful expression.

III 18 Do you really believe that your lilting arrival has

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

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

III 21 plunged inside into him at the impulse of touching.

III 22 Call him ... you will not call him wholly away from darksome affinity.

III 23 To be sure, he is willing, he springs forth; soothed, he accustoms

III 24 himself into your secretive heart and takes and begins himself.

III 25 But did he ever begin himself?

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

III 27 to you he was new, you leaned over the fresh

III 28 eyes the friendly world and deflected the strange one.

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

III 30 with your willowy figure blocked off from him upsurging chaos?

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

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

III 33 you mingled more human space with his night-space.

III 34 Not into the darkness, no, into your nearer existence

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

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

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

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

III 39 your tender arising: behind the wardrobe retreated,

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

III 41 slipped, lightly displaced, his unquiet future.

III 42 And he himself, as he lay relieved under

III 43 lulling eyelids of your gentle arranging,

III 44 dissolving sweetness into tasted initial sleep —:

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

III 46 hindered inside him the rising tides of origin?

III 47 Ah, there was no caution inside the sleeping one; sleeping

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

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

III 50 with inner occurrence’s burgeoning vines

III 51 already entwined in patterns, in animally

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

III 53 Loved his internality, his internality’s wilderness,

III 54 this aboriginal forest inside him, on whose mute toppledness,

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

III 56 across his own roots into powerful origin,

III 57 where his tiny birth was already outlived. Loving,

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

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

III 60 fearsomeness knew him, winked as if notified.

III 61 Yes, the terrible smiled . . . Seldom

III 62 have you smiled so tenderly, mother. How should

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

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

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

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

III 67 single year; there rises, when we love,

III 68 immemorial sap into our arms. Oh maid,

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

III 70 the unnumbered fermenting; not an individual child,

III 71 but the forefathers who, like the detritus of mountain ranges,

III 72 repose in our bedrock; but the dry river-bed

III 73 of erstwhile mothers —; but the entire

III 74 soundless landscape under cloudy or

III 75 clear fatality —: this came before you, maid.

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

III 77 up primordial times in your lover. What feelings

III 78 burrowed upward from beings transmuted and far. What

III 79 women hated you then. What sinister men

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

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

III 82 perform before him a loving dependable daily task, — lead him

III 83 near to the garden, give him the nights’

III 84 preponderance……..

III 85 Preserve him….

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

Click here to go to German Text of the Fourth Elegy

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