Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic
Orders? And even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his
stronger existence. For Beauty is nothing
but beginning of Terror we are still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because it serenely
disdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible.
And so I keep down my heart, and swallow the call-note
of depth-dark sobbing. Alas, who is there
we can make use of? Not angels, not men;
and already the knowing brutes are aware
that we don’t feel very securely at home
within our interpreted world. There remains, perhaps,
some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day,
there remains for us yesterday’s walk and the cupboard-love loyalty
of a habit that liked us and stayed and never gave notice.
Oh, and there is Night, there is Night, when wind full of cosmic space
feeds on our faces: for whom would she not remain,
longed for, mild disenchantress, painfully there
for the lonely heart to achieve? Is she lighter for her lovers?
Alas, with each other they only conceal their lot!
Don’t you know yet?—Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe—maybe that the birds
will feel the extended air in more intimate flight.
Yes, the Springs had need of you. Many a star
was waiting for you to espy it. Many a wave
would rise on the past towards you; or, else, perhaps,
as you went by an open window, a violin
would be giving itself to someone. All this was a trust.
But were you equal to it? Were you not always
distracted by expectation, as though all this
where announcing someone to love? (As if you could hope
to conceal her, with all those great strange thoughts
going in and out and often staying overnight!)
No, when longing comes over you, sing the great lovers: the fame
of all they can feel is far from immortal enough.
Those whom you almost envied, those forsaken, you found
so far beyond the requited in loving. Begin
ever anew their never attainable praise.
Consider: the Hero continues, even his fall
was a pretext for further existence, an ultimate birth.
But lovers are taken back by exhausted Nature
into herself, as though such creative force
could never be re-exerted. Have you so fully rememberanced
Gaspara Stampa, that any girl, whose beloved has
eluded her, may feel, from that far intenser
example of loving: “if I could become like her!”?
Ought not these oldest sufferings of ours to be yielding
more fruit by now? Is it not time that, in loving,
we freed ourselves from the loved one, and, quivering, endured:
as the arrow endures the string, to become, in the gathering out-leap,
something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.
Voices, voices. Hear, O my heart, as only
saints have heard; heard till the giant-call
lifted them off the ground; yet they went impossibly
on with their kneeling, in undistracted attention:
so inherently hearers. Not that you could endure
the voice of God—far from it. But hark to the suspiration,
the uninterrupted news that grows out of silence.
Rustling towards you now from those youthfully-dead.
Whenever you entered a church in Rome or in Naples
were you not always being quietly addressed by their fate?
Or else an inscription sublimely imposed itself on you,
as, lately, the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.
What they require of me? I must gently remove the appearance
of suffered injustice, that hinders
a little, at times, their purely-proceeding spirits.
True, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to use no longer customs scarcely acquired,
not to interpret roses, and other things
that promise so much, in terms of human future;
to be no longer all that one used to be
in endlessly anxious hands, and to lay aside
even one’s proper name like a broken toy.
Strange, not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange,
to see all that was once relation so loosely fluttering
hither and thither in space. And it is hard, being dead,
and full of retrieving before one begins to espy
a trace of eternity.—Yes, but all of the living
make the mistake of drawing to sharp distinctions.
Angels, (they say) are often unable to tell
whether they move among the living or the dead. the eternal
torrent whirls all the ages through either realm
for ever, and sounds above their voices in both.
They’ve finally no more need of us, the early-departed,
one’s gently weaned from terrestrial things as one mildly
outgrows the breasts of a mother. But we, that have need of
such mighty secrets, we, for whom sorrow is so often
source of blessedest progress, could we exist without them?
Is the story in vain, how once, in the mourning for Linos,
venturing earliest music pierced barren numbness, and how,
in the horrified space an almost deified youth
suddenly quitted for ever, emptiness first
felt the vibration that now charms us and comforts and helps?